I've heard that VMware has the ability to do delta (incremental) images but I've never found it. With Qemu it's easy to make a large (read-only) system image (burned to CD or DVD, for example) and have all disk writes go to a different smaller media (like the USB flash drive you booted from, which is how qemu on knoppix on a PC with one DVD drive can have access to a 7GB compressed system image without using the hard disk.
Also disk image deltas can be useful to have small variations on a base system. For example, an incremental image whose only change is to set some application option, another incremental image whose only change is to set a different option, or perhaps a new incremental image for every new windows patch that comes out. Need to test something against win2k with only critical patches applied? Or all patches until a particular one? That would all be possible, and all of it sharing and reusing a common disk image, instead of having 20, 50, or 100 full duplicates of a system install. Unfortunately it's difficult to change the location of a base image once incremental images are made, and bridged ethernet funcationality could be a problem for some uses, but overall qemu is very versatile. _______________________________________________ Qemu-devel mailing list Qemu-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/qemu-devel
