The multistrap script at https://gist.github.com/anonymous/50dfdfe99438e53c8e58 https://gist.github.com/anonymous/50dfdfe99438e53c8e58 produces a 425mb Debian s

The multistrap script at https://gist.github.com/anonymous/50dfdfe99438e53c8e58 https://gist.github.com/anonymous/50dfdfe99438e53c8e58 produces a 425mb Debian system including vim, Linux kernel, Apache, perl and Ruby. After bzip2 that's 115mb, which is about a second's worth of GigE. But that's assuming you even need to transfer or copy the base image, which in a healthy setup it should be possible to avoid -- the majority of Linux distributions bundle very similar content, and amongst virtual machines of the same distribution, the base systems are almost identical. It wouldn't be difficult to create a differential transfer protocol and/or virtualized block device for this specific use case that minimized copies and transfers. There is plenty of open source tech for this already. For example with LVM2 thin provisioning it's possible to clone and resize a VM image from 2GB to 40GB, ready for boot in under 2 seconds.. https://gist.github.com/anonymous/fdcbcc27278c287ce5e0 https://gist.github.com/anonymous/fdcbcc27278c287ce5e0