Sphere 3D Corp. (ANY)

[ral4]

Thanks JB3729

Many legacy applications just don’t perform well in a virtual environment;

Thats it in a nutshell, many applications are not written for VM stacks, and hence don't work well in them, if at all. And the VM approach used by many cloud providers today are heavyweight. You need a hypervisor and each application requires an operating system per user. Peter T has said many times that Glassware does not use a hypervisor.

Open-source Docker containers mentioned in Strufte's post appears to be an attempt at a more lightweight solution, and that approach is being pursued by Red Hat. This article from last year gives a good explanation of the difference between VM and Container approach.

m.linuxjournal.com/content/containers—not-virtual-machines—are-future-cloud

However it becomes tricky when you try to create a cross-platform solution on the server side using linux containers. As Struftepete points out, you could run open-source QEMU inside a container... but the problem is QEMU works great as a "virtualizer" when used with KVM for acceleration for like for like hardware architectures, but the performance is not so good when QEMU is used as an "emulator" for different architectures.

resources.infosecinstitute.com/qemu-windows-guest-introduction/

Glassware appears to be even more lightweight again. Running applications on a Glassware server appears to be akin to running the application on your PC or laptop. After discussions with some IT experts earlier this year, I had begun to suspect that Glassware was drawing on some of the open-source technologies discussed above and in previous posts. But I'm glad to learn that is not the case and that most of their technology appears to be proprietary. Its a new approach that appears to have been made possible by drawing on John Morelli's long experience dealing with these problems, particularly emulation and remoting protocols.

jmo