why vimage?

[Jase Thew]

Julian Elischer wrote:
> some people have asked me why I would want vimage..
> The answer is because it allows you to do lots of things easily
> that are hard to do normally.
> 
> I can give a very simple example of something you can do trivially on 
> vimage:
> 
> Make three virtual machines on yhour laptop:
> The base machine and two others.
> Have the first 'other' machine be assigned an IP address on
> your HOME LAN.
> have the second virtual machine have an IP adddress on
> your WORK LAN.
> use the base machine to run encrypted tunnels from where-ever
> you happen to be to your work and home.. when you put the laptop to 
> sleep (assuming the tcp sessions are quiescent (no keepalives))
> then when you wake it up say an hour later.. as soon as the base 
> machine has an IP address.. viola, your session on the virtual
> machines are still alive.
> 
> there are SO MANY things you can do with this..  and the framework
> allows us to proceed with more virtualisation including
> separate PID spaces or processor quotas etc.
> 
> BUT the framework will never get the mindshare needed unless people 
> start playing with it.
> 

vimage will be a boon for replacing full system jails. I think the more 
important question is:  why people *wouldn't* want vimage incorporated 
into the tree? The benefits it offers are pretty vast and from what I 
can see, there are hardly any disadvantages ( although I'm willing to be 
enlightened if there are any major gotchas ).

Jase.