[Xen-users] Shared Non-Persistant Windows XP 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
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.
I could probably do this by writing a kernel hook and intercepting  
all reads and writes to the C: drive, but I'd really hate to have to  
write a UnionFS for Windows.
Are there any senior Xen software engineers out there who've done  
this or who might know how.   If we can't find a way to do it we'll  
have to skip Xen and use VMWare ESX.
Thanks,

Jim Burnes


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