Re: NetBSD+Xen with short-lived throw-away guests

[Stephen Borrill <netbsd%precedence.co.uk@localhost>]

On Wed, 5 Mar 2014, Stephan wrote:
> What we need is something like Citrix Provisioning Services.

Yes - but even Linux is not longer supported as guest by PVS.

XenServer 6.2 has clone-on-boot (designed for MCS as opposed to PVS*) 
which would be a good option.

The problem is the inflexibility of NetBSD's storage backends compared to 
the blktap stuff used by Linux. jmcneill@ was working on VHD support for 
vnd which he then spun out into userland by implementing a libvdisk, but 
this work was never finished. This would allow much more flexible storage
backends (such as the VHD chains as used by XenServer or qcow). OTOH, LVM
snapshots would be useful, but NetBSD doesn't support that either.

* - feel free to ignore all these TLAs if you aren't into Citrix stuff.

--
Stephen