[Xen-devel] Writing a tool for Shared Persistent Windows Boot Image

[Jim Burnes <jvburnes@xxxxxxxxx>]

Before, in my "Hard Problem" email I was trying to communicate a  
design issue were trying to solve with Xen.
This is what we need to do:

1) Deploy 24 Windows XP VMs in parallel.
2) Boot them from a shared Windows XP C: drive.
3) Since this is a read-only shared image we obviously can't have  
multiple VM's writing to it.
4) All writes to the boot image for logging, registry and other  
purposes should be diverted to an auxiliary shadow drive specific to  
each VM.
5) After we shut down the VM we need to mount and examine the  
contents of the shadow drive
6) When we are done examining the contents of the shadow drive, we  
need to fast format it for the next VM to use.
Is this supported natively in Xen?  What does everyone else who needs  
to run a lot of Windows VMs do?  There must be a way to support  
shared images.
The reason I posted this to xen-devel is that I could probably  
implement a UnionFS for Windows by writing a kernel hook and  
intercepting all reads and writes to the C: drive, but I don't have  
enough time to do that right now.  Because of schedule constraints,  
if we don't find a way to do this in Xen/XenSource we'll have to drop  
Xen and move on to VMWare ESX at considerable cost to our project.
Are there any senior Xen software engineers out there who've done  
this or who might know how?
Thanks,

Jim Burnes


_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel