9 ms·

Containers for Windows

80 points by FlyingSnake 12y ago

jarcane 12y ago
As someone who has had a hell of a time setting up and consistently getting running certain programming language environments, this appeals to me greatly. It was countless headaches getting Clojure to work, and I still can't update cabal for Haskell without breaking everything.
- levosmetalo 12y ago
  I don't understand what's so hard to get clojure to work. You only need Java and lein, and that's about it. Af for Haskel cabal hell, just use "cabal sandbox" and be happy.
  - kenjioba 12y ago
    A few comments here: - Some people (myself included) do not want to install Java on their desktop. Among other reasons, Java is a frequent source of security vulnerabilities. This allows you to use Java-based applications without installing the JVM on your desktop. - Some applications require specific versions of Java to work correctly. I may want to do Clojure with the latest JVM while another application might require Java 6. With Spoon, you can handle this easily: > spoon run jre:8.0,modern-project > spoon run jre:6.45,legacy-project - If you have other servers or components (databases, apache/nginx, etc), those can be installed in the same container or linked together in other containers. Many projects come with a long list of setup instructions (install this, change that flag, etc). With containers, those go away -- just publish a pre-configured dev environment. - Spoon containers in particular support a concept called "continuation" that stores transient container state between commits. If you mess up your dev environment, you can restart execution at a specific state ID. This is also extremely powerful for testing. And continuation points migrate between machines -- if you want to continue your work on a different box, just execute the same "spoon continue" instruction and your container restarts. And for clarity, these are built on lightweight VMs, not whole OS VMs. Spin up time is very rapid (excluding of course any time to download images) and you can run dozens of containers on your box with minimal overhead. (Will address this point in more detail in response to a separate thread.)
- kenjioba 12y ago
  Thanks -- we have a Clojure image up already: > spoon run clojure and Haskell/Cabal sounds like a great idea as well.
lucasjans 12y ago
Is it open source? This would be a requirement for many, including myself. I see no mention of licensing on the page.
- tacon 12y ago
  When Microsoft delivers real containers to Windows, I doubt they will make it open source. You can require open source interfaces to closed source products, and wait a long time.
altcognito 12y ago
> Because containers are built on the Spoon virtualization engine, rather than simply providing an interface to container support in an underlying operating system, Spoon can containerize applications across multiple operating systems and provide advanced virtualization primitives. That means it's not containerization, but virtualization. This hardly compares to the Docker world which offers a intermediate build system (edit: Spoon has a build system however), rich command line tools (edit: it does provide some command line tools) to work with images and containers, fast spin up times, and an ecosystem of container management tools. Oh, and also this: > Spoon.net is free to use with public repositories. Private repositories, automated testing, legacy OS and browser emulation, and other advanced features are available in paid subscriptions starting at $19 per month. And.... that it isn't open source. -- It does however supporting composing of build images, which is kind of nice. I've learned to like mounting volumes as a form of composing though within Docker.
- ape4 12y ago
  Well somebody should update a Wikipedia page about Spoon.
- kenjioba 12y ago
  > That means it's not containerization, but virtualization. See above response. > This hardly compares to the Docker world which offers a intermediate build system (edit: Spoon has a build system however), rich command line tools (edit: it does provide some command line tools) to work with images and containers, fast spin up times, and an ecosystem of container management tools. The Spoon build system and command line tools superset Docker functionality. And Spoon does have fast spin up times and very low overhead. And Spoon does provide container management tools (Spoon Studio and Spoon Enterprise Server), although these are currently more oriented towards desktop applications vs server applications as with the Docker.
  - altcognito 12y ago
    Your installer is a browser plug-in. I realize (and appreciate) that the world is browser driven today, but I'm sorry, there is no way I'm using a browser plugin to install a completely unrelated client application. If there is another way to install the app, I'll be happy to take another look.
flipchart 12y ago
Yeah, this page[1] outright admits that it is virtualization, not containerization. I'd rather wait for the next version of Windows which will have true built in containerization and will work with Docker [1] https://spoon.net/docs/getting-started/transitioning-from-docker https://spoon.net/docs/getting-started/transitioning-from-do...
- kenjioba 12y ago
  The two are not contradictory -- one technology enables another. See detailed response above.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Danieru 12y ago
I was interested in how they got containerization working on a kernel which to my knowledge lacks the required primitives. What I found was marketing looking to treat containerization as nothing more than a buzz word. The article is tone deaf. It talks about running foreign OSes and legacy support proud in itself because docker cannot. Yet blind to the reason docker cannot: Docker is containers! Any VM can do what this is doing. This is boring and I feel taken advantage of. They promised Containers can gave fast deployment VMs. On their own that is cool, but not when wrapped in a lie.
- kenjioba 12y ago
  See corrections above.
rkangel 12y ago
Could we make a complaint to whatever the US version of Trading Standards is? They're misselling themselves. Containers are a relatively well defined concept as distinct from virtualisation, and they're misleading people.
hamidpalo 12y ago
There actually is containerization for windows that does not do VMs: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enterprise/products-and-technologies/mdop/app-v.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enterprise/products-a...
- mariusmg 12y ago
  Isn't "containerization" without VMs "better" and faster than with VMs ? If then waht's all the talk about bringing Docker to Windows ? Is "containerization" a real word ?
bane 12y ago
Not really "containers" but "VMs" Here's my call on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8245682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8245682
vld 12y ago
OT; the screenshot on the page is 4.3MB, same image at 330KB: http://i.imgur.com/jMMD3uR.png http://i.imgur.com/jMMD3uR.png
htilonom 12y ago
Since this isn't what they say it is... try http://www.sandboxie.com/ http://www.sandboxie.com/
hamiltont 12y ago
Wikipedia talk page for Spoon discusses including a section about this misuse of the term "container" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spoon_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spoon_(software)
jclarkcom 12y ago
Spoon is very similar to VMware Thinapp, which I started 10+ years ago. Both have a lot of similarities to Docker, but there are important areas that cannot be addressed without Microsoft's support (see recent announcement between Microsoft and Docker). There are also other similar solutions in the industry like Microsoft AppV and VMware recently acquired a product called "Cloud Volumes". Similarities: - You can package your application into a single file and then run that on a clean Windows OS without installing. Startup times will vary - mostly based on the app. Docker advertises millisecond startup times, Thinapp is probably in the 10s of milliseconds to startup - but if the app comes packaged with a lot of fonts these may need to be extracted from the package first (not a problem for server apps). - There are command line tools you can use to build your package using something like a makefile. - You can package runtimes and support applications into your packages (.net, SQL server, etc). - In Thinapp & others most filesystem and registry writes by the application are redirect to a sandboxed location. The sandbox directory can be located on another storage mechanism, so the VM can be treated as stateless. Differences: - Docker provides full namespace isolation between apps, another app on the same system won't affect your app. In Thinapp and others, this isn't 100% the case - for example names of shared memory objects, window titles, and most of the filesystem/registry will share a namespace with other processes. Thinapp has the ability to apply namespace isolation in specific cases, but doesn't do it by default because this can cause comparability issues. - Docker provides network isolation. Each app gets it's own private network stack this eliminates port collisions, etc. This is not the case for Thinapp, etc. - OS comparability is not assured, you still need to test your app on various OS's to make sure it works compared to Docker. For example, if your app uses a new API from Windows 7 - it will not run on Windows XP. In some cases this isn't true, you can use Thinapp/spoon to package an app with some DLLs from earlier or later versions of windows so it will run on older/newer versions - but that is not the case for things that use core system DLLs like ntdll or kernel32. I'm curious how Microsoft will address this when they introduce containers. If you are running your app inside of a clean VM on amazon, you don't care as much about isolation of namespaces, filesystem, and network - so these solutions might be viable. Microsoft had an old research project that died that is very close to Docker: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/141071/asplos2011-drawbridge.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/141071/asplos2011-drawbri... Some other comments state this is the same as VMs, it's not. Application virtualization is a bit closer to Wine - it emulates parts of the Windows loader to load applications and it places hooks in all the application's API calls to access the filesystem, register, services, etc. It hooks all API calls that might need to access something from the system so those calls can be redirected to access data inside the package. Anyway - Spoon's announcement doesn't go into any detail on what is new relating to what they are providing, it seems a bit of marketing repositioning to capture some of Docker's popularity. But - it could be a good place for them to be if/when Microsoft completes it's work on isolated containers, if they can provide a solution in that space that competes with Docker (and "free") they might find a market.
dubcanada 12y ago
Sort of off topic, but how does Spoon relate too services like TestingBot for Selenium testing in the cloud?
- kenjioba 12y ago
  Spoon has a Selenium testing service at http://spoon.net/selenium http://spoon.net/selenium. The difference relative to other cloud testing services is that the Selenium Grid and clients are all instantiated on the local dev box. The tests generally execute much faster than cloud-hosted VMs and you can access local network resources without establish a tunnel. (The service does interact with the Spoon.net cloud to do things like capture screenshots, store test transcripts, publish results, team collaboration, and so forth.)
frik 12y ago
> Spoon is the first and only containerization service available on the Windows platform Sandboxie was the first one: http://www.sandboxie.com http://www.sandboxie.com , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandboxie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandboxie
- RachelF 12y ago
  Thinstall, bought by VmWare and rebranded and ThinApp is another. Thinstall worked well on Windows Vista, but battled to work properly on Windows 7. The problem with working with Microsoft is that you're one Windows Update away from having it cause issues with your product.
- kybernetikos 12y ago
  I'd also come across FeatherweightVM http://sourceforge.net/projects/fvm-rni/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/fvm-rni/
ABS 12y ago
they maintain that these are containers and it's only a matter of confusion: https://twitter.com/spoonapps/status/538038020755456000 https://twitter.com/spoonapps/status/538038020755456000 looking forward to clearer documentation if that's the case
- kenjioba 12y ago
  We've added information in the docs to address some of the confusion revealed in this thread.
skrebbel 12y ago
All the people who diss this are nitpicking over details way too much. Yep, it's virtualization and not containers in the LXC sense, and yep, it's commercial-as-fuck and closed source. Yep, the linked blog post is mostly marketing blarp, announcing already-existing technology as if it's new by calling it different. That's pretty sad. Still, Spoon is pretty cool, it allows you to do many of the things people use Docker for, on Windows: package an application, together with all of its dependencies, into a single image, and allow the user to run that single image and have it "just work" and start fast. Spoon virtualized executables start super fast, completely incomparable to starting a VM and then running a program in it, which is what everybody in this thread seems to be comparing this with. Spoon also does this in a way that's much more accessible than Docker: A Spoon "image" is just a Windows executable, you can hand it to any user who's able to double-click an icon. That's really quite cool, especially for distributing desktop apps. Reality is that Spoon does something that is about halfway between running an OS in a VM and LXC containers. If I were the marketing guy, I'd also call this containers, because so many of the benefits (including startup speed) are comparable. Calling it "virtualization" will make many readers think "slow, 10GB downloads, long startup times, little windows in a big window", none of which apply here. Finally, all the ranting about how this isn't Docker at all distracts from something that IMHO is very interesting: Spoon is really decent technology, which has worked very great for very many years now (well before Docker even existed), even though it's been pretty niche among geeks. It should also be interesting to HN how Spoon, the company, has managed to pivot its way through a changing landscape and different hypes. Not that long ago, Spoon's major product was a desktop program, Spoon Studio, that allowed you to package software with its dependencies for easy distribution. If you now look on https://spoon.net https://spoon.net you're going to have a hard time finding that at all. It's an interesting business! With cool technology! GitHub is closed source too, why all the hate?
- skrebbel 12y ago
  On a marginally related note, I so wish Microsoft would offer free Spoon'ed IE6/7/8/9/10 executables instead of those humongous Windows VMs they have on http://modern.ie http://modern.ie now. Spoon is perfect for solving this problem, and even if you only directly help Windows devs with it, I bet many devs on OSX/Linux have some Windows VM lying around somewhere. (Spoon actually offers this, but at a steep price)
webwanderings 12y ago
> Spoon works through a small browser plugin. Small as in 24.8 MB. That's not small.
ittan 12y ago
http://sp.parallels.com/products/parallels-containers-windows/ http://sp.parallels.com/products/parallels-containers-window..., not free but around for a while

80 points by FlyingSnake 12y ago

As someone who has had a hell of a time setting up and consistently getting running certain programming language environments, this appeals to me greatly. It was countless headaches getting Clojure to work, and I still can't update cabal for Haskell without breaking everything.

levosmetalo 12y ago
I don't understand what's so hard to get clojure to work. You only need Java and lein, and that's about it. Af for Haskel cabal hell, just use "cabal sandbox" and be happy.
- kenjioba 12y ago
  A few comments here: - Some people (myself included) do not want to install Java on their desktop. Among other reasons, Java is a frequent source of security vulnerabilities. This allows you to use Java-based applications without installing the JVM on your desktop. - Some applications require specific versions of Java to work correctly. I may want to do Clojure with the latest JVM while another application might require Java 6. With Spoon, you can handle this easily: > spoon run jre:8.0,modern-project > spoon run jre:6.45,legacy-project - If you have other servers or components (databases, apache/nginx, etc), those can be installed in the same container or linked together in other containers. Many projects come with a long list of setup instructions (install this, change that flag, etc). With containers, those go away -- just publish a pre-configured dev environment. - Spoon containers in particular support a concept called "continuation" that stores transient container state between commits. If you mess up your dev environment, you can restart execution at a specific state ID. This is also extremely powerful for testing. And continuation points migrate between machines -- if you want to continue your work on a different box, just execute the same "spoon continue" instruction and your container restarts. And for clarity, these are built on lightweight VMs, not whole OS VMs. Spin up time is very rapid (excluding of course any time to download images) and you can run dozens of containers on your box with minimal overhead. (Will address this point in more detail in response to a separate thread.)
kenjioba 12y ago
Thanks -- we have a Clojure image up already: > spoon run clojure and Haskell/Cabal sounds like a great idea as well.

lucasjans 12y ago

Is it open source? This would be a requirement for many, including myself. I see no mention of licensing on the page.

tacon 12y ago
When Microsoft delivers real containers to Windows, I doubt they will make it open source. You can require open source interfaces to closed source products, and wait a long time.

altcognito 12y ago

> Because containers are built on the Spoon virtualization engine, rather than simply providing an interface to container support in an underlying operating system, Spoon can containerize applications across multiple operating systems and provide advanced virtualization primitives. That means it's not containerization, but virtualization. This hardly compares to the Docker world which offers a intermediate build system (edit: Spoon has a build system however), rich command line tools (edit: it does provide some command line tools) to work with images and containers, fast spin up times, and an ecosystem of container management tools. Oh, and also this: > Spoon.net is free to use with public repositories. Private repositories, automated testing, legacy OS and browser emulation, and other advanced features are available in paid subscriptions starting at $19 per month. And.... that it isn't open source. -- It does however supporting composing of build images, which is kind of nice. I've learned to like mounting volumes as a form of composing though within Docker.

ape4 12y ago
Well somebody should update a Wikipedia page about Spoon.
kenjioba 12y ago
> That means it's not containerization, but virtualization. See above response. > This hardly compares to the Docker world which offers a intermediate build system (edit: Spoon has a build system however), rich command line tools (edit: it does provide some command line tools) to work with images and containers, fast spin up times, and an ecosystem of container management tools. The Spoon build system and command line tools superset Docker functionality. And Spoon does have fast spin up times and very low overhead. And Spoon does provide container management tools (Spoon Studio and Spoon Enterprise Server), although these are currently more oriented towards desktop applications vs server applications as with the Docker.
- altcognito 12y ago
  Your installer is a browser plug-in. I realize (and appreciate) that the world is browser driven today, but I'm sorry, there is no way I'm using a browser plugin to install a completely unrelated client application. If there is another way to install the app, I'll be happy to take another look.

flipchart 12y ago

Yeah, this page[1] outright admits that it is virtualization, not containerization. I'd rather wait for the next version of Windows which will have true built in containerization and will work with Docker [1] https://spoon.net/docs/getting-started/transitioning-from-docker https://spoon.net/docs/getting-started/transitioning-from-do...

kenjioba 12y ago
The two are not contradictory -- one technology enables another. See detailed response above.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Danieru 12y ago

I was interested in how they got containerization working on a kernel which to my knowledge lacks the required primitives. What I found was marketing looking to treat containerization as nothing more than a buzz word. The article is tone deaf. It talks about running foreign OSes and legacy support proud in itself because docker cannot. Yet blind to the reason docker cannot: Docker is containers! Any VM can do what this is doing. This is boring and I feel taken advantage of. They promised Containers can gave fast deployment VMs. On their own that is cool, but not when wrapped in a lie.

kenjioba 12y ago
See corrections above.

rkangel 12y ago

Could we make a complaint to whatever the US version of Trading Standards is? They're misselling themselves. Containers are a relatively well defined concept as distinct from virtualisation, and they're misleading people.

hamidpalo 12y ago

There actually is containerization for windows that does not do VMs: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enterprise/products-and-technologies/mdop/app-v.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enterprise/products-a...

mariusmg 12y ago
Isn't "containerization" without VMs "better" and faster than with VMs ? If then waht's all the talk about bringing Docker to Windows ? Is "containerization" a real word ?

bane 12y ago

Not really "containers" but "VMs" Here's my call on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8245682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8245682

vld 12y ago

OT; the screenshot on the page is 4.3MB, same image at 330KB: http://i.imgur.com/jMMD3uR.png http://i.imgur.com/jMMD3uR.png

htilonom 12y ago

Since this isn't what they say it is... try http://www.sandboxie.com/ http://www.sandboxie.com/

hamiltont 12y ago

Wikipedia talk page for Spoon discusses including a section about this misuse of the term "container" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spoon_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spoon_(software)

jclarkcom 12y ago

Spoon is very similar to VMware Thinapp, which I started 10+ years ago. Both have a lot of similarities to Docker, but there are important areas that cannot be addressed without Microsoft's support (see recent announcement between Microsoft and Docker). There are also other similar solutions in the industry like Microsoft AppV and VMware recently acquired a product called "Cloud Volumes". Similarities: - You can package your application into a single file and then run that on a clean Windows OS without installing. Startup times will vary - mostly based on the app. Docker advertises millisecond startup times, Thinapp is probably in the 10s of milliseconds to startup - but if the app comes packaged with a lot of fonts these may need to be extracted from the package first (not a problem for server apps). - There are command line tools you can use to build your package using something like a makefile. - You can package runtimes and support applications into your packages (.net, SQL server, etc). - In Thinapp & others most filesystem and registry writes by the application are redirect to a sandboxed location. The sandbox directory can be located on another storage mechanism, so the VM can be treated as stateless. Differences: - Docker provides full namespace isolation between apps, another app on the same system won't affect your app. In Thinapp and others, this isn't 100% the case - for example names of shared memory objects, window titles, and most of the filesystem/registry will share a namespace with other processes. Thinapp has the ability to apply namespace isolation in specific cases, but doesn't do it by default because this can cause comparability issues. - Docker provides network isolation. Each app gets it's own private network stack this eliminates port collisions, etc. This is not the case for Thinapp, etc. - OS comparability is not assured, you still need to test your app on various OS's to make sure it works compared to Docker. For example, if your app uses a new API from Windows 7 - it will not run on Windows XP. In some cases this isn't true, you can use Thinapp/spoon to package an app with some DLLs from earlier or later versions of windows so it will run on older/newer versions - but that is not the case for things that use core system DLLs like ntdll or kernel32. I'm curious how Microsoft will address this when they introduce containers. If you are running your app inside of a clean VM on amazon, you don't care as much about isolation of namespaces, filesystem, and network - so these solutions might be viable. Microsoft had an old research project that died that is very close to Docker: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/141071/asplos2011-drawbridge.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/141071/asplos2011-drawbri... Some other comments state this is the same as VMs, it's not. Application virtualization is a bit closer to Wine - it emulates parts of the Windows loader to load applications and it places hooks in all the application's API calls to access the filesystem, register, services, etc. It hooks all API calls that might need to access something from the system so those calls can be redirected to access data inside the package. Anyway - Spoon's announcement doesn't go into any detail on what is new relating to what they are providing, it seems a bit of marketing repositioning to capture some of Docker's popularity. But - it could be a good place for them to be if/when Microsoft completes it's work on isolated containers, if they can provide a solution in that space that competes with Docker (and "free") they might find a market.

dubcanada 12y ago

Sort of off topic, but how does Spoon relate too services like TestingBot for Selenium testing in the cloud?

kenjioba 12y ago
Spoon has a Selenium testing service at http://spoon.net/selenium http://spoon.net/selenium. The difference relative to other cloud testing services is that the Selenium Grid and clients are all instantiated on the local dev box. The tests generally execute much faster than cloud-hosted VMs and you can access local network resources without establish a tunnel. (The service does interact with the Spoon.net cloud to do things like capture screenshots, store test transcripts, publish results, team collaboration, and so forth.)

frik 12y ago

> Spoon is the first and only containerization service available on the Windows platform Sandboxie was the first one: http://www.sandboxie.com http://www.sandboxie.com , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandboxie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandboxie

RachelF 12y ago
Thinstall, bought by VmWare and rebranded and ThinApp is another. Thinstall worked well on Windows Vista, but battled to work properly on Windows 7. The problem with working with Microsoft is that you're one Windows Update away from having it cause issues with your product.
kybernetikos 12y ago
I'd also come across FeatherweightVM http://sourceforge.net/projects/fvm-rni/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/fvm-rni/

ABS 12y ago

they maintain that these are containers and it's only a matter of confusion: https://twitter.com/spoonapps/status/538038020755456000 https://twitter.com/spoonapps/status/538038020755456000 looking forward to clearer documentation if that's the case

kenjioba 12y ago
We've added information in the docs to address some of the confusion revealed in this thread.

skrebbel 12y ago

All the people who diss this are nitpicking over details way too much. Yep, it's virtualization and not containers in the LXC sense, and yep, it's commercial-as-fuck and closed source. Yep, the linked blog post is mostly marketing blarp, announcing already-existing technology as if it's new by calling it different. That's pretty sad. Still, Spoon is pretty cool, it allows you to do many of the things people use Docker for, on Windows: package an application, together with all of its dependencies, into a single image, and allow the user to run that single image and have it "just work" and start fast. Spoon virtualized executables start super fast, completely incomparable to starting a VM and then running a program in it, which is what everybody in this thread seems to be comparing this with. Spoon also does this in a way that's much more accessible than Docker: A Spoon "image" is just a Windows executable, you can hand it to any user who's able to double-click an icon. That's really quite cool, especially for distributing desktop apps. Reality is that Spoon does something that is about halfway between running an OS in a VM and LXC containers. If I were the marketing guy, I'd also call this containers, because so many of the benefits (including startup speed) are comparable. Calling it "virtualization" will make many readers think "slow, 10GB downloads, long startup times, little windows in a big window", none of which apply here. Finally, all the ranting about how this isn't Docker at all distracts from something that IMHO is very interesting: Spoon is really decent technology, which has worked very great for very many years now (well before Docker even existed), even though it's been pretty niche among geeks. It should also be interesting to HN how Spoon, the company, has managed to pivot its way through a changing landscape and different hypes. Not that long ago, Spoon's major product was a desktop program, Spoon Studio, that allowed you to package software with its dependencies for easy distribution. If you now look on https://spoon.net https://spoon.net you're going to have a hard time finding that at all. It's an interesting business! With cool technology! GitHub is closed source too, why all the hate?

skrebbel 12y ago
On a marginally related note, I so wish Microsoft would offer free Spoon'ed IE6/7/8/9/10 executables instead of those humongous Windows VMs they have on http://modern.ie http://modern.ie now. Spoon is perfect for solving this problem, and even if you only directly help Windows devs with it, I bet many devs on OSX/Linux have some Windows VM lying around somewhere. (Spoon actually offers this, but at a steep price)

webwanderings 12y ago

> Spoon works through a small browser plugin. Small as in 24.8 MB. That's not small.

ittan 12y ago

http://sp.parallels.com/products/parallels-containers-windows/ http://sp.parallels.com/products/parallels-containers-window..., not free but around for a while