maintaining many Xen VMs

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

I recently brought up 3 DomUs; the result, of course, is that I now have 3
more machines to administer.  This is known as a bad tradeoff...  I'm
curious, though, how other people are solving this.

My (NetBSD) DomUs are going to be mostly identical.  I was thinking of
having a shared, read-only /usr and separate /var.  I probably need
separate roots, if only to have separate /etc/rc.conf files.  /usr will be
a real partition, probably shared with the Dom0.  The Dom0 would also have
a separate partition that held the vnds for the DomUs.

The problem is updating pkgsrc -- compilations on the Dom0 (with the DomUs
shut down) would be slow, since I'm not allocating much phyiscal memory to
Dom0.

Anyway -- how are other people handling this?  I thought about NFS, but I
suspect it's too slow.

                --Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb