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First, Emulab has been around longer than Amazon's or Google's cloud. It's a bit stricter than GPL, being AGPL, in which any users that contact the service have to be given sourc code (i.e., even the server), which makes it difficult to legally use by big businesses. Second, Amazon at least is pretty likely to be running Xen and other GPL software under the covers.

The company I work for uses True Image for our Windows deployments. The disk images save us a _ton_ of time when we need to do things like build twenty identical systems or create a new variant of an existing system. When we deploy new systems I can have the hardware shipped to our datacenter and the disks shipped to the office. I restore the Acronis image to each disk and then just ship the disks out. I've also got images prepared that contain a minimal Windows OS install as a starting point. This saves a few hours of work when it comes time to prepare a new type of server. We also ship external USB drives containing Acronis images to each datacenter so that the local tech can rebuild systems on-site.

The two major problems we've had with True Image are related to unsupported NICs (no driver on the boot CD) and interaction with on-board RAID controllers. Acronis has a very active message board and they are very good about addressing any problems their customers may encounter.

I've been meaning to look into frisbee, but simply haven't made the time. Frisbee's attractive because it's OS independent and supports multicast installs. There's a research paper on Emulab's site that claims near constant install times even as the number of simultaneous installs grows.

Ooh, just found Emulab - looks promising!! Offers access to lots of PCs running various OSs.

Also, forgot to mention access to Cray Unicos (and other supercomputers!) and pdp unix preservation society (not just PDP images).

You should be able to get this to work on your gentoo live CDs. I'm not sure about it working in OSX:

http://www.emulab.net/software.php3

Even in whole disk mode, this thing is scorching. I've not seen anything commercial or free that touches it in terms of speed. The whole thing is multithreaded. I use it for restoring PCs on a test bench after regression testing. In fs-aware mode it'll restore a ~5Gb file system in a matter of about 4-5 minutes.

-Peter

I'm sick of having to walk down to the server room to get on the console of Linux boxes and there are a slew of things that cannot easily be done with current x86 offerings.

Try configuring a serial line console. I was installing/upgrading linux, performing fscks through a BSD slice on the same box, and rebooting as needed. This system is in Utah. I'm in Massachusetts. If you want some more information, check out www.emulab.net. (I don't know if this solves "a slew of things" however.)

http://www.emulab.net/software.php3 This is the best disk imaging solution as far as we know. We use it in emulab to reload disks very frequently. Read the Usenix paper mentioned in the above page for details.

Frisbee is a university project that we use to do software regression testing. We have to reimage machines all the time.

Read the whitepaper for how it works. The long and the short of it, is that I can take a hard disk image that previously was deployed via Ghost and 5 CDs and distribute it to N machines on our LAN in about 4 to 5 minutes. Cool stuff.

-Peter

Frisbee is a university project that we use to do software regression testing. We have to reimage machines all the time.

Read the whitepaper for how it works. The long and the short of it, is that I can take a hard disk image that previously was deployed via Ghost and 5 CDs and distribute it to N machines on our LAN in about 4 to 5 minutes. Cool stuff.

-Peter