The Debian-Live approach also provides some good opportunities. First and foremost, the very easy remastering makes it efficient to run with no persistent store quite often. For instance, upon remastering, I just start without the store, and the image I run is union-mounted with the persistence file and copied&compressed. Then I have to boot something else to copy the new squashfs image in place, but that's all that has to be done outside the system.
Boot the new image without persistence, create a new persistence file.
For further adaptations, the new persistence file can be mounted in an instance run under kvm, programs can be added and settings tweaked for an eventual new remastering.
Storing the series of squashfs-compressed images, one can always go back in this process if needed.
DELL M630 BLADE SERVER x2 XEON E5-2660V3 @ 2.6GH H730 PERC HDD CADDIES 16GB FC
$50.00
Dell PowerEdge M620 Blade Server
$39.99
Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis Enclosure 8x B200 M4 16x E5-2640v3 128gb
$599.99
UCSB-B200-M4 UCS Blade Server, 2x E5-2667 V3, 256GB RAM DDR4, 2x 300GB Drives
$299.99
UCSB-B480-M5, CISCO UCSB-B480-M5 V05 UCS B480 M5 BLADE SERVER W UCSB-MLOM-40G-03
$950.00
2 x HP ProLiant BL460c (447707-B21) Blade Servers No RAM No HDD
$30.00
Dell PowerEdge VRTX Rack Chassis 25-Bay 14.4TB HDD 2x M640 Blade 512GB RAM 2-Bay
$2335.00
HP BL460c 2SFF GEN9 Blade Server 2x 12 Core Xeon E5-2670 v3 256GB RAM 600GB HDD
$199.99
HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9 Blade 2x E5-2697v3 2.6GHz =28 Cores 32GB P244BR 650FLB
$180.00
HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9 Blade 2x E5-2660v3 2.6GHz =20 Cores 64GB P244BR 650FLB
$196.00