I am enquiring from a University here in the UK. Please could someone clarify whether ParaView can be virtualised?
If you mean “can ParaView be run in a virtual machine,” the answer is yes. The only difficulty is if you want hardware-accelerated 3D rendering. Different virtual machines provide differently levels of support for this, but in my experience, it usually isn’t great. ParaView will render fine with a software OpenGL implementation, but it will be slower than hardware accelerated rendering if you are rendering large data sets.
Hi Cory, Thank you for your reply. Sorry I should’ve elaborated - I meant, if the software was installed on a University laptop, for instance, can the user then be able to use it at home or anywhere off-site, or would it have to be used within the University?
ParaView is an open source product. It is self contained software, so if it is installed locally on a laptop, it can run regardless of where that laptop is. So the short answer is, yes, as you have described you should be able to at least start ParaView regardless of where the laptop is located.
That said, ParaView has client/server features that might not work correctly if you move the laptop away from your Universitie’s network. But you should still be able to launch ParaView with no trouble. It is also possible that your University provides a modified version of ParaView that requires a network connection. (Modifications are allowed under ParaView’s license.) But if you’ve downloaded Kitware’s version from paraview.org, that is not an issue.
(I’m not sure what any of this has to do with virtualization.)
Thanks for your help Cory, that’s much appreciated.