PXE Booting a Virtual Hard Drive?

Hi everyone,

If this is in the wrong subforum, forgive me as it (I think so) covers severs areas of technology.

To start out with, I have several bootable antivirus images on one usb stick. The problem with this is they all require definition updates (about 100mb for about 7 odd bootable AVs) when started. If I use persistence, it would mean to dedicate a USB for every AV (unless I use multiple partitions, messing around with grub, etc.), which is kind of inefficient.

Then I remembered I have a Windows 2K8R2 server that PXE boots Windows 7/8/2K8 etc. for reinstallations, and I thought "A network bootable persistent AV!". I would dedicate a VHD/VMDK (maybe 5-10GB) for each AV, have persistence AV definitions, be able to boot each one from a network, and update them in a virtual machine.

My question is, has anyone had any experience with this in 2K8R2 or FOG server? Would it be possible?

 

Thanks for the responses and links everyone.

They all seem to do pretty much the same thing with a few extra features.

Another question; after booting from the VMDK/VHD, does it recognize the physical disk on the client (supposedly diskless) computer?