will this clever plan work?

["Eric S. Johansson" <esj@harvee.org>]

(originally posted via gmame but never showed up)

I thought of two applications for Xen that could be amusing.  First is 
as a base for a firewall.  The idea would be that in order to upgrade to 
the next release of the firewall, you would create a new virtual machine 
image and disable (but not necessarily expire) the previous version.

Ideally these would be complete system images that one could just add to 
and replace as necessary.  I do hope it's also possible for a linux 
system to change the xen configuration so it could boot to the new 
configuration.

Second I have another project would require running a Gentoo based 
system that can handle multiple virtual instances (maybe as many as 10 
or 20) of a stock application configuration.

My fantasy is that I will be able to build a single disk image for all
of the basic OS and application to be shared between multiple virtual
machines.  Update that single core image using Gentoo magic and be able
to have separate partitions holding my application data.

in the test case, I'm running with a couple of SCSI disks for the OS and
a raid 1 (79 GB real storage) for holding all the virtual system "disk
images".

real?  Fantasy?  Roll up my sleeves and work really really hard,
documenting as I go to make somebody else's life easier?

don't worry about disappointing me.  I have already been disappointed
with EVMS but only enough to make me go away for six months.  ;-)

thank you for whatever information you give me.

---eric


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