VM Reset at the VM level

[harryzahn]

We have just installed ESX server and are servicing out VM's to thin clients. We have locked down the VM's. We created a shortcut for the students in the lab to click on to shutdown and reset the OS. Does anyone know if it is possible to script shutting down the OS and resetting the VM within a VM session so profile specific desktop configs etc get set to defaults for generic accounts.

We are seeing some ESX server side solutions but we want the students to initiate this at the end of every class so the next user has a clean desktop to work with.

Thanks.

[jnhall]

Is the thin VM client Linux? You could write a Perl Toolkit script to instruct VC or ESX to do whatever you want with the VM - from within the client VM itself (as long as firewalling etc. permits) - but you need to sort out both file-level (read-write-execute) permissions as well as VC/ESX permissions so that someone couldn't use Toolkit to do other stuff to your servers as well. A setuid script would probably be safe enough. There may also be enough granularity in the security model for other approaches to work. Is this the sort of thing you're talking about? It's wouldn't be trivial to write and set up but shouldn't be that hard either, just a little tedious.