Initial Goal
..is to run Gleam in a VM. Probably that entails
- Make an "appliance": rhel5 or rhel6 VM with Gleam executable and all required libraries, job options, etc.
- To start, would be simplest to run MC job, write output to VM local disk.
- Write program or script for host machine which will do one of the following:
- start up Gleam in the already-up-and-running VM
- first boot up the VM, then ask it to run Gleam
Choices
Which Virtualization Software?
To start, experimenting with VirtualBox , but since we're only concerned with Linux for now, VMware (VMplayer product) would do as well; there may be other suitable candidates. Advantages of VirtualBox compared to VMware are
- Supported OSes
- VirtualBox supports Linux, Windows and Mac for client and host (though there are a bunch of restrictions for Mac, mostly due to the way Apple does things).
- VMplayer supports Linux and Windows
- API
- VirtualBox API (the same one used internally, hence complete) supports C++, python, and any other languages that understand (Microsoft) COM or, on non-Windows platforms, XPCOM for applications running on the host. There is also a web service which implements nearly the complete API. Any language with a toolkit for wsdl can use this. It's especially easy to use from Python and Java because the VirtualBox SDK includes wrapper classes for these languages.
- The free SDK product VIX can be used with VMplayer. Functionality is somewhat limited compared to use with non-free products VMworkstation and vSphere, but may be sufficient for us. In particular, it does include the ability to start a program on a VM. Bindings exist only for C, Perl, and (Microsoft) COM.