Remote invocation / data passing

[klcmay]

On a machine I plan to have several VMs each running some proprietary software which I wish to automate with MS. It may help to ignore the fact they are VMs and just consider them separate machines on a private network as I don't think it makes any difference.

The situation I have is:
- VM1 is essentially a control console. This is used to display status and trigger events on the other VMs when buttons are pressed.
- VM2, VM3... VMx are independent "clones" containing some custom software I wish to automate. They never talk to each other only to VM1.

My requirements are:
- VM2,VM3... VMx will do some batch runs and when they need input they will halt, asking VM1 (the control console) for a decision.
- VM1 needs to run macros on VM2,VM3... VMx
- VM2, VM3, VMx needs to run the requested macro and send status back to VM1. Often data (small volumes) will also be sent
- VM2, VM3, VMx needs to be able to trigger a macro on VM1. Again, there could be some data involved.

I'm happy I can do this quite easily (it sounds more complex than it actually is). I was wondering though if anybody has any thoughts on the best way to do the interprocess communication.

There are a number of ways to do this and I'm not sure what would be the simplest (and with reasonable performance - which is fairly important). I could watch files, use a message queue, invoke Java RPC or many other techniques. I'm also aware of msNet (Macro Scheduler Remote Controller) which may help although I've never used this and would need to check the license situation. How heavywight is this? I don't really want to run a full blown server on every virtual machine as they have limited CPU and RAM available.

Hoping to start this at the weekend, so any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,

Ken

[Marcus Tettmar]

All your suggestions sound fine to me. A network share and an INI file is nice and simple. A SQL database is another option. Keep it simple.