Running X on XenServer Host
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@scottalanmiller said:
I have never heard of someone wanting to do a local console redirection of that sort with Xen but, reading up on it a little, it appears that it should work. Just install a desktop into the Dom0 and fire it up.
huh, that is actually kinda my dream setup.
I think an awesome consumer solution would be a hypervisor running on the hardware and their OS install is a VM. Then the system could take snapshots say every 24 hours (but be customizable), at the 23 hour mark (with some type of setup to detect being used by the user) the system would delete the snapshot, before doing it again.
While I'm a bit specific above, the general idea is a way to protect the user with a super easy way to roll back in time, the whole system. You get hit by cryptolocker, just rock back. The problem I've away considered about users using VMs is managing things that they want to keep. An automated way to create and merge snapshots would go a long way.
All of this of course also needs to provide local console access.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I have never heard of someone wanting to do a local console redirection of that sort with Xen but, reading up on it a little, it appears that it should work. Just install a desktop into the Dom0 and fire it up.
huh, that is actually kinda my dream setup.
I think an awesome consumer solution would be a hypervisor running on the hardware and their OS install is a VM. Then the system could take snapshots say every 24 hours (but be customizable), at the 23 hour mark (with some type of setup to detect being used by the user) the system would delete the snapshot, before doing it again.
While I'm a bit specific above, the general idea is a way to protect the user with a super easy way to roll back in time, the whole system. You get hit by cryptolocker, just rock back. The problem I've away considered about users using VMs is managing things that they want to keep. An automated way to create and merge snapshots would go a long way.
All of this of course also needs to provide local console access.
You can get that with Windows 8 or later with HyperV too. Or you can get what you want from DeepFreeze from Faronics. Windows XP had SteadyState built in that did that.
Virtualizing your desktop OS isn't always good, especially if you game.
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DeepFreeze could be doable if it had an automated freeze/unfreeze setup.
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@Dashrender said:
DeepFreeze could be doable if it had an automated freeze/unfreeze setup.
I think that it might. Although you would want to be careful about that as you might freeze after being infected but before you knew it.
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yeah, some type of automated setup that check the amount of change before commiting the next change to an unfreeze/freeze cycle would be needed.
It's all about trying to find a solution for typical end users (home users).
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For home users I think ideal is having an IOSafe with RAID 1, all data stored there and snaps enabled.
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Or Chromebooks. Those are ideal for typical home users.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Or Chromebooks. Those are ideal for typical home users.
as much as I hate the idea of chromebooks, you're probably right.
Why do I hate them.. because I don't want to live in a web only world.. call me weird
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Why use Xen for home users? Why not just run Linux directly and snap it? What benefit is Xen delivering for a normal end user desktop? What VMs will they be running?
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Or Chromebooks. Those are ideal for typical home users.
as much as I hate the idea of chromebooks, you're probably right.
Why do I hate them.. because I don't want to live in a web only world.. call me weirdTypical end users already live in a web only world
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My comments weren't about Xen, it was about a hypervisor, any hypervisor that could snap the whole system regularly to give a full point in time restore with little to no effort on the part of the user.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Typical end users already live in a web only world
And that's why I agreed you're probably right.
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@Dashrender said:
My comments weren't about Xen, it was about a hypervisor, any hypervisor that could snap the whole system regularly to give a full point in time restore with little to no effort on the part of the user.
Why a hypervisor? Snapping is a storage feature, not a virtualization feature.
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What you really want is not to be a typical home end user
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If you are happy with end users on Linux on Xen, you'd love just regular Linux Mint as is.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
My comments weren't about Xen, it was about a hypervisor, any hypervisor that could snap the whole system regularly to give a full point in time restore with little to no effort on the part of the user.
Why a hypervisor? Snapping is a storage feature, not a virtualization feature.
I suppose because I've never seen it outside of a virtualization situation.
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If I'm going to move users to linux, I'd skip it and go directly to chromebooks, assuming they didn't have any specific apps needs.
But then you already suggested that
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I'm considering Windows based options that allow for easier, better recovery when they get into trouble.. I'm probably just reaching... ending up at a moot point.
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@Dashrender said:
I'm considering Windows based options that allow for easier, better recovery when they get into trouble.. I'm probably just reaching... ending up at a moot point.
Xen can't do that. The Dom0 is Linux or NetBSD only today. The Dom0 has to be fully paravirtualized and Windows does not support that. So anything along this line would be purely Linux or UNIX based.
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@Dashrender said:
I suppose because I've never seen it outside of a virtualization situation.
It's a pretty universal feature and has been for decades. Virtualization solutions (including ESXi up through 4.x) used existing operating system snapshot capabilities in their storage layer to handle this, it's not part of the virtualization itself.
In Linux this is delivered via LVM, ZFS or BtrFS, on FreeBSD and Solaris through an LVM or ZFS, on AIX through LVM, HP-UX via VxFS, on Windows through VSS, etc.
