VHD support

[Theblacksheep]

Anyone else think this could be a useful feature?

 

1st part of 3: Aviraj Ajgekar's Blog : Windows 7: Boot from VHD First Impression: Part 1

 

 

Simple imaging of machines with built in VHD backups you can point to when the first C drive corrupted.

[tmcd35]

I read about this feature and I admit it's got my spidy senses tingling. Booting a physical hardware from a VHD would make imaging so much easier. Question, does the VHD need to be on the boot pc's hd, or can this be done with a network boot.

 

What I'd really like to be able to do is seamlessly boot directly into a VM within about 1.5 - 2mins. ie, user turns a PC on. It boots VM and loads OS from VHD/VMDK sitting on the network. User thinks PC as booted into Windows normally and doesn't know/realise the difference.

[synaesthesia]

Bugger me, didn't see that! I was playing around with the management console for a good day as well!

 

If so that's very good news, I'm forever playing around with virtualisation and have a plethora (just shy of 500gb) of virtual drives and machines in use - this would make life that little bit easier!

 

Cheers for the heads up!

[PiqueABoo]

It boots VM and loads OS from VHD/VMDK sitting on the network

 

How big is that VHD/VMDK? How many machines have you got? How many images can you store? And did you turn off machine password updates to save you that bother after reverting.. and is doing that good security? How fast is redirected across the network virtual disk I/O likely to be?

 

I'm in one of those picky moods tonight sorry, but I'm struggling to see why you'd do that rather than run thin client.

Edited February 3, 2009 by PiqueABoo

[tmcd35]

How big is that VHD/VMDK? How many machines have you got? How many images can you store? And did you turn off machine password updates to save you that bother after reverting.. and is doing that good security?

 

I'm in one of those picky moods tonight sorry, but I'm struggling to see why you'd do that rather than run thin client.

 

Don't worry about being picky, this is just an idea I've had for a while but haven't had the time to investigate properly.

 

The problem with Thin Client is if the OS goes down it goes down for everyone. The problem with VDI is although it solves the initial problem with Thin Clients it still based on sharing one server amongst x users.

 

The problem with desktop workstations is managing software install, drivers and images.

 

The idea is to get the convenance of a single common hard drive image ala TS or VDI, but with all the power of local workstation hardware.

 

Virtual applications is another way around this problem, but the cost of the various virtual app solutions is prohibative.

 

I basically want to boot an bare metal hypervisor on the local workstation and boot it off a common VHD/VMDK stored on the network.

 

How meny images are needed? what are the security implications? no idea, it's just an idea for now. Maybe next term when I've got more time on my hands I might be able to flesh the idea out a bit.