You'll need some mechanism to re-deploy major updates that cannot be accomplished via custom mechanisms, and that's most likely to still be ... Why wouldn't th

You'll need some mechanism to re-deploy major updates that cannot be accomplished via custom mechanisms, and that's most likely to still be ... Why wouldn't the virtual machine bootstrap itself from network loaded code -- then it wouldn't be necessary to update the root Xen image. Why couldn't I write a network service (also on the VM) that runs on other Xen instances and serves up the netboot code? Why would updating the root VM require SSH? Couldn't I have a nice web management UI that I can just upload a new bootstrap JVM image to (on the rare occasions that I need to?). Perhaps systems could directly self-update the root Xen image on reboot? I don't know why I'd have turtles-all-the-way down and then require some ugly update system that involves editing RC scripts.