Multi Windows 10 Gaming/School VM Strategy

[ehftwelve]

My kids are all home schooled. I have a need for several PCs, so I opted to try getting something work with Unraid and VMs. I will be having about 3 VMs running at a time (Windows 10) for either gaming or school work. My initial strategy, to save both disk space and for reuse, would be to utilize btrfs and

cp —reflink

to have a “master” VM and then copies of the master VM for the other 2 VMs, only updating the other VMs when anything system wide is changed (new software installed etc).

 

My reasoning for going this route is because I have small children that will be using this VMs so rolling back in case of any catastrophe will be simple.

 

Has anyone else accomplished something long term like this? Are there issues I’m just not considering?

 

I know any changes the users have made that deviate from the “master” VM will be erased, so I suppose I would need to have a mapped network drive to store data like Documents and things. Is it possible to store the AppData folders on the users home directory to a network drive as well? And the utilize symlinks to make it seamless? Or am I just way off base and making things much too complicated so I should just go the traditional route and give each user their own VM? With snapshots etc created in case of catastrophe.

 

I’m very interested in anyone’s thoughts on this scenario. Thank you!

 

TL;DR does it make sense and is it practical to use btrfs and just

cp —reflink

a single VM to be used my multiple users at once?

[itimpi]

I think that the ideas you are mentioning are viable and it is something I have been looking at trying myself (although I have not yet done so).  

 

If Windows does not like a network drive for Documents and the like you could always give each User their own private vdisk set up a second drive to their VM.   You can then locate such a vdisk anywhere you like on the Unraid system.

 

i would be interested in any future feedback on how you get on.

 

it also seems likely that leveraging BTRFS for snapshotting is something Limetech may start using in the virtualisation support they ship with Unraid at some point in the future.   It seems an obvious thing to do both for Use Cases like your and for helping with backing up VMs.