[Qemu-devel] VistA on QEMU

[Nancy Anthracite]

I signed up for this developers list specifically to find the experts I needed 
to ask this question.  

I am the volunteer CMO of WorldVistA (www.worldvista.org).  We are a 
charitable non-profit that promotes the use of the Department of Veterans 
Affairs' VistA outside of the VA. VistA is an M based,  open source, medical 
records and hospital management system.  We have a version of it that is 
called WorldVistA EHR and all code we have added to it all carries the GPL 
version 2 or later license.  WorldVistA EHR is the only CCHIT certified open 
source medical records system to my knowledge.

Now all of this leads up to my question.  We very much like putting demos of 
VistA on QEMU machines on Linux with GT.M. That gives us a totally open 
source stack.  But I have been reluctant to recommend QEMU for a production 
system because I don't think there would be "hard writes" of the data entered 
into the M database to a hard disk on a QEMU machine, and thus if there were 
loss of power, and unpredictable amount of patient related data could be 
lost.

I wonder if I am correct in that assumption or not, and if I am, if there 
might be an option that could be invoked, as I understand can be invoked on a 
VMWare virtual machine, to actually write data to the hard disk right away.

Ultimately we would like to distribute configured, ready to use virtual 
machines for doctors to use in their offices with backup other virtual 
machines that can be placed remotely for accepting data for backup.  It would 
make the  use of VistA much easier and far more user friendly.

Any help you can give me would be much appreciated.  I promise not to hang 
around bothering you on a developers list where I don't really belong for 
long.
-- 
Nancy Anthracite, MD
Chief Medical Officer
WorldVistA
address@hidden
301-738-2150