Replace library WinXPs by virtual WinXPs on Fedora KVM?

[Rob]

Hi,

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.

Is this a feasible idea?
If yes, can you give me some clues how to start?

Thank you!
Rob.

[Richard W.M. Jones]

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.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines.  Supports shell scripting,
bindings from many languages.  http://libguestfs.org