On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 07:30:49PM -0700, Rob wrote:
The current situation:
- About 500 university library PCs run WinXP as the main OS.
What I would like to know if following is possible:
- Replace the WinXP by Fedora with virtualization software (KVM ?) and have
WinXP as a guest OS, in such a way that the users immediately boot into WinXP without noticing the virtualization.
- Over the network it should still be possible to access the host Fedora OS.
I'm sure a better idea is some sort of VDI: the machines boot Fedora, but running a SPICE client which talks to a big-ass server in a back room somewhere that runs hundreds of virtual machines.
Is this a feasible idea? If yes, can you give me some clues how to start?
It's tricky. You'd probably want to start by experimenting with a boot service (/etc/init.d/99-run-windows) which just starts up the Windows guest and a full screen instance of virt-viewer. I don't off- hand know if X is available by this point and if you need to get rid of GDM. Be careful not to inadvertently open up a root shell while doing this.
Then you would have to explore how you're going to distribute this without manually installing it on every desktop. Some sort of PXE image with a kickstart file is probably the way to go.
Do you want a standard Windows XP image shared between all the machines, perhaps booted from NFS? Or is each machine going to store its own WinXP guest image? There are of course licensing issues too.
VDI really is the way to go here :-)
Rich.