I will be running several (at least 10, probably more) Windows 7 virtual machines on a Linux server and I am looking for a way to manage this efficiently. All the machines will be identical except for the MAC address/hostname. The reason for virtualization is purely parallel processing of the same task.
The ideal scenario for me would be to have one master image that I maintain (with things like Windows Updates) from which the actual processing VMs clone on boot. I have googled quite a bit but I can't seem to find anything like this.
The closest I can find is creating a master VM and creating linked clones. Whenever I update the master VM I would have to delete all the linked clones and create new linked clones based on the most recent snapshot.
I am wondering whether this is the best way to tackle this. In terms of technology I am currently leaning towards virtualbox headless VMs.
Do you guys have any suggestions to do this more efficiently? Or would you recommend f.e. Xen for this specific scenario?
