[kwlug-disc] KVM hypervisor for Win7 with snapshots

[Paul Nijjar]

On Thu, Jun 02, 2016 at 01:50:03AM -0400, Digimer wrote:
> On 02/06/16 01:39 AM, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc wrote:
> > 
> > it looks like using KVM might be a solution. Outstanding questions at
> > this point: 
> > 
> > - Has anybody set something like this up?
> 
> We host a lot of Win7 guests on KVM on our systems. However, we don't
> try to have them look like windows on boot. Instead, we let gnome boot
> and show the user how to open virt-manager, double-click on the VM and
> full screen it. Even our no-idea-about-linux-at-all users get this
> pretty quickly. There may be a way to do it though with auto-login and
> setting gnome to auto-start virt-manager... not sure.

One idea I have heard of is to start X without a window manager, and
then open a VNC session on that session. There are a bunch of
questions I have around this (performance? USB redirection? Pressing
Alt-F1 to break out?) but it might be a possibility. 

What kind of specifications do you need to run Win7 guests over KVM
well? Would 4GB RAM be enough?

> What I would recommend is this; Stop the windows machine, create the
> snapshot, start windows back up. By snapshotting this way, you can be
> 100% certain that the image will be consistent and reliable. Given that
> you can boot immediately after you create the snapshot and then 'dd'
> out, the downtime should be minimal.

That is helpful, thanks. We would only be taking snapshots after
updates, so I think that we could make sure the machines are off.

- Paul 

-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org