I was playing around with my VDM2/VDI setup that was still present on my laptop since my VDM2 presentation at the Dutch VMUG. I’m running Workstation 6 and have installed ESX 3.0 as a virtual machine. Within ESX 3.0 I created one base Windows XP virtual machine and added two empty virtual machines without a virtual disk. Since I created a small VMFS I placed the Windows XP virtual machine in snapshot mode and added the virtual disk from this virtual machine as an existing disk to the other two virtual machines. I added the base disk as an independed nonpersistent virtual disk so the changes of my shadow virtual machines are discarded when I power off or revert to a snapshot. Besides an IP address conflict all three machines are running fine. In the images you can see the snapshot file and the REDO files of my shadow virtual machines. This technique could same me a lot of VDI-VMDK disk space in the first place, but what about the Windows XP license, it’s only installed once......
