Virtualizing KDE's

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> Ok, figuring out how advanced you are is always a problem with new folks.

Can't know everything, takes too much time :). However, the question was which is the most efficient combination of vm server and kde desktops. Right now, I've been toying with vmware but I prefer using the virtual server in rhel. I've been using GFS for various shared applications and use FC network storage as main storage for all servers exporting CIFS and NFS mostly.
 
> First: virtualization is setting up a meta-o/s, so that everyone in a given
> virtual server thinks and acts as though they have a real server of their
> very own. I can think back to the late seventies, on IBM mainframes, and regions
> or partitions (DOS/VSE vs. MVS).

If I recall, the mainframe stuff was terminals and a workstation tied onto a network. The workstations either booted off their own or a network image and used the mainframes resources, all shared. 

In virtualization, seems to be a lot more flexible in that you can still run that type of environment or give everyone what amounts to their own workstations. The latter is what I am interested in. This way, I can centrally maintain backups, storage and even maintenance.
 
> X is like Windows 3.x, *NOT* 95 or NT. It's a GUI windowing environment
> running on top of the O/S, not part of it. (The #1 thing I hold against its
> design.) If you think of a d/b server, and other machines pointing to it for their
> queries, X is like that. Frequently, you're on the same machine; but you can be on
> any  machine. In that case, it's exactly like the old mainframe environments with
> terminals.

I've not had much experience with X as workstations have always been win machines. Linux has been the backbone since the early 90's for us. In fact, I recall slackware manual installs is how I started. Anyhow, never got much X time in so don't know much about it. 

Are you saying that X can have a server and a number of remote clients? If that's the case, do the clients appear to the user as a personal workstation or just an instance of X until they are done? Do they get their own storage areas, settings, things like that? 

Either way, it sounds like virtualization is what I am after if I want to give them what amounts to a full pc, just that it's centralized.
 
> Terminology: as I mentioned, X terminology is absolutely the opposite of the
> way *every* other usage of it is. If it were a d/b, in X terminology, the
> d/b server would be the client, and the machines calling it would be the
> servers.

Does that mean the other way around then? Each X workstation is actually what, the server? And they all share a central X client or something? I'm not clear on this. 
 
> So you can set up the global defaults on one server, so that unless folks
> customize their own environment, they log in on their machines, they
> effectively log into the X-terminology "client", and all come into X with
> exactly the same stuff, running on that server, not on their own.

So you set up the default settings on a server that you call the master then the clients which are actually independent X workstations use that as their central server? 

It sounds like something that could be very useful but it also sounds like it would take me away from what I really want to do which is to learn about, and put to use, new virtualization techniques. While the ideas have been around for a very long time in computing, the new technologies associated with it and coming are too great to pass up methinks.

Mike