[kwlug-disc] KVM hypervisor for Win7 with snapshots

[William Park]

I guess you're talking about "-snapshot" option.  If you can get QEMU to
run in full-screen mode, instead of the usual desktop in your startup
script, then it might be doable.  
    - ordinary users get VM right away,
    - admin users get the normal desktop to do the "updates".
-- 
William

On Thu, Jun 02, 2016 at 01:39:28AM -0400, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc wrote:
> 
> We are tired of our Windows-based "rollback" software that is supposed
> to restore Win7 machines to a pristine state upon reboot. This
> software is costing us hours of maintenance each week. It is time
> to find a replacement.
> 
> One idea is to run a very thin Linux installation, and then install
> Win7 into a virtual machine on that host. When the machine boots it
> should appear to be booting into Windows, and the end user should be
> interacting with the guest Win7 install. The next time the computer
> reboots the "hypervisor" starts the Win7 install again from a
> snapshot, which accomplishes the rollback.
> 
> As with every rollback solution, the hard part is updating the guest
> VM in an automated way.  (Yes, I really want to do updates, thanks.) 
> Somehow I want to install updates on the guest (I have scripts to do
> most of this) and then take a new snapshot of the VM to use as the
> rollback baseline. I think I might be able to do this via some clever
> scheduled tasks. 
> 
> >From this link:
> http://serverfault.com/questions/631317/windows-7-as-kvm-guest-installation-with-virtio-drivers-detected-virtio-scsi-d
> 
> it looks like using KVM might be a solution. Outstanding questions at
> this point: 
> 
> - Has anybody set something like this up?
> - Are there existing configurations out there that already do this? I
>   am searching on the Internet, but obviously I am not looking for the
>   right terms.
> - How do I go about booting the host so that the guest VM comes up
>   automatically, and users don't need to know that they are running in
>   a virtualized environment?
> 
> Sorry for the vague questions, and the proprietary software focus. I
> am in the very early stages of researching this. 
> 
> If you are looking for an example of the software we are trying to
> mimic, look at "DeepFreeze" or "Drive Vaccine". 
> 
> There is a windows-only solution called "Steadier State", but it
> requires installing Windows into a VHD on a bare drive, which is going
> to be more difficult than installing Windows into a virtual machine.
> 
> - Paul 
> 
> -- 
> http://pnijjar.freeshell.org
> 
> 
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