Jonathan Hunt met with Paul Lembo at VMware to discuss potential options and show stoppers

1. What are the options to authenticate a VM before launching it?  ACE?
   Maybe shared BIOS password
   Trivial with ACE, but that leaves us with a read-only VM which has other limitations
2. How can we update VMs out of band?
   Not if we allow modification of the VM like installing software, configuring user accounts, etc.
3. What is the recommended way, short of a distributed file system, for keeping user data separate from the system VM?  2nd virtual drive, share to local drive?
   Best way is with VDI and offline desktop which is expected in 2010
4. What are best practices to prepare a duplicatable Windows XP VM?
   

Notes from Meeting:# ACE has some performance limitations for high performance apps like Matlab or Solidworks

• We could script a dump of the vdk or snapshot so that backups at least to local disk happens periodically
• We should focus on backing up the whole VDK, as only 2-3GB will be base OS, the rest will be customizations and user data.
• We should educate the students on using snapshots to protect their work
• Talked about OS vdk in kiosk mode (read only)
• Can't really do out of band patching with the VM open to changes and resident on the students' machines
• To patch a read-only (kiosk) VDK you require a new OS VDK to be downloaded
• Should be able to re-enable the Windows prompt to configure new account (1st login after install)  - google this
• We should consider running the keyserver agent on the VM maybe blocking IE or other windows app unless they authenticate with kerberos - what MAC addr comes across when configured for NAT
• Paul is going to send me the docs on VMrun (Workstation only), which could be good for backups, look for key server agent and stop once an hour if not found (but can't be configured to look only at the student VM we're interested in).