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[Xen-users] Shared Non-Persistant Windows XP Boot Image

To: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Xen-users] Shared Non-Persistant Windows XP Boot Image
From: Jim Burnes <jvburnes@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:22:28 -0600
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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


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