Too much virtualization isn't good [LWN.net]

Too much virtualization isn't good

Posted Jan 14, 2011 16:26 UTC (Fri) by cabrilo (guest, #72372)
In reply to: My personal experience as a lawyer with Linux by pspinler
Parent article: Lawyers Can Leave Windows for Linux OS Ubuntu (SEOLawFirm.com)

Pat, what would be the purpose of that?

The point of migrating from Windows to Linux is, for most people, twofold: to reduce cost of software (not a huge issue for an average lawyer though) and to provide a more stable and secure system and in my opinion, an easier and more productive work environment.

If a person is using Office in a virtual machine, that person will likely end up using the virtual machine to also browse the web and work with email. E.g. just think of the steps needed to email a document in such a setup. Person would need to save it to a shared folder, then switch back to the host machine and send it from there. Or say that you want to use a desktop search tool, such as Beagle, to access your documents...

If one's daily routine is inside a guest, then one is going to feel all the downsides of the guest operating system.

Snapshots are great, but in a real world scenario, a lawyer wants to have all her documents backed up and a spare machine in case something is wrong with the main one (be it malware or failed power supply). Virtualization can only save you if the hardware is still functioning.

The best solution is probably to keep a server or a network storage of some sort dedicated to serving files (e.g. Apple's Time Machine is a nice example of this).

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Too much virtualization isn't good

Posted Jan 14, 2011 16:48 UTC (Fri) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]

"If a person is using Office in a virtual machine, that person will likely end up using the virtual machine to also browse the web and work with email."

Not so much anymore with Unity (and functional equivalents). I sometimes have Visual Studio on my desktop to test/compile stuff, but I never had the urge to open another Windows program.

Too much virtualization isn't good

Posted Jan 14, 2011 22:43 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]

While my setup may not be that good a match, I would make a couple of points...

Running MS Office under Wine might be a good choice, it's apparently noticeably faster than under Windows :-)

I use VirtualBox to run Windows, and the home directories are shared with linux - ie ~/Documents and "My Documents" are the same directory on the host hard disk.

Both Firefox and Thunderbird are configured to have the same local storage in linux and windows, so it doesn't matter which they're fired up under (and I think they can be fired up under both at the same time - that's certainly true of firefox), you see all your mail, bookmarks etc in either.

And I use linux as the host os because I use xdm so both my wife and I can share the same pc at the same time :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Too much virtualization isn't good

Posted Jun 2, 2011 14:48 UTC (Thu) by Jan_Zerebecki (guest, #70319) [Link]

"(and I think they can be fired up under both at the same time - that's certainly true of firefox)"

That might corrupt your profile. It should warn you (it normally uses a lock file to detect this situation), because some parts of the profile are modified in a way that is not safe to do in a concurrent way.

Too much virtualization isn't good

Posted Jan 17, 2011 4:23 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

One possible advantageous setup might be to have a virtual machine per client, generated on demand, and only containing things for client interaction. You wouldn't be tempted to browse the web or read email in the virtual machine because you'd need to install software to do it, and the native software is already there. This would also provide a bit of useful technological isolation between clients.

Too much virtualization isn't good

Posted Jan 17, 2011 12:37 UTC (Mon) by cabrilo (guest, #72372) [Link]

It's an interesting concept, I do it for my own stuff (I'm a freelance programmer, so I usually keep a clean environment for each one of my bigger projects).

However, lawyers usually have a huge number of clients, and they need to archive everything well, so think in terms of a decade of cases and different clients. I'm not sure how that would scale to dozens or even hundreds of clients.

Too much virtualization isn't good

Posted Jan 17, 2011 20:29 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

That's why I'm thinking they'd be generated on demand. Aside from the client you're currently billing, and clients you've done work for earlier that day, the virtual machine would consist only of a configuration file specifying how to assemble the filesystem that would be seen if you booted that client's VM, and the document directories in the VM would come from a client-specific directory on the file server, and everything else is a read-only map of sections of the native, local filesystem. This has the additional benefit that, inside the VM, you actually can't write a document that isn't going to the location that's archived for the client. So you can't accidentally put a document you're writing on the desktop and fail to get it archived as related to the particular client it was for.

In any case, done properly, there shouldn't be any resource whose usage scales with the number of VMs that have ever been set up in a way that is not significantly smaller than the usage required anyway for the client's documents. And an individual lawyer isn't going to do work for a huge number of clients at the same time, so the "working set" scaling isn't too big a deal.