I worked for the College of Natural Sciences as the local University and we are still growining in computers! At nearly 2000 printers/servers/desktops/laptops registered for two full-time support staff it's getting a to be a challenge!!
Our labs are now on a 4 year replacement cycle due to the growth in labs (use to be 3 years). So, we will be replacing about 70 computers in the Industrial Technology department this summer. This will cost us at least $70K. I'm thinking this may be a good time to look at VMware View. We have about 400 computers in the 4 year rotations used for teaching and open lab hours. The total utilization is less than 20% for sure if not closer to 10%!
The biggest catch this summer with the Ind Tech lab is they run Pro/E and Autodesk Inventor, AutoCAD, and other rendering programs. I'm ASSuming VMware View will not work with these programs, correct? I hope it will work as it will save us a TON of money! Plus, the computers these Ind Tech students are using for their CAD programs are P4s with 1GB of RAM. Which doesn't meet the requirements for any of the programs, but they are 4 years old! So, I'm trying to figure out a way of getting around this in 4 years down the road! If all I do is have to throw in a few more servers rather than 70 new computers then I'm all for it!
Is anyone else using VMware View or similar type setups in their labs? Even if this summer isn't a good year for it, the other years may be as the software doesn't require OpenGL etc. Some of our labs are also dual-boot for Linux and Windows so I also think VMware View would help with that.
Our labs are now on a 4 year replacement cycle due to the growth in labs (use to be 3 years). So, we will be replacing about 70 computers in the Industrial Technology department this summer. This will cost us at least $70K. I'm thinking this may be a good time to look at VMware View. We have about 400 computers in the 4 year rotations used for teaching and open lab hours. The total utilization is less than 20% for sure if not closer to 10%!
The biggest catch this summer with the Ind Tech lab is they run Pro/E and Autodesk Inventor, AutoCAD, and other rendering programs. I'm ASSuming VMware View will not work with these programs, correct? I hope it will work as it will save us a TON of money! Plus, the computers these Ind Tech students are using for their CAD programs are P4s with 1GB of RAM. Which doesn't meet the requirements for any of the programs, but they are 4 years old! So, I'm trying to figure out a way of getting around this in 4 years down the road! If all I do is have to throw in a few more servers rather than 70 new computers then I'm all for it!
Is anyone else using VMware View or similar type setups in their labs? Even if this summer isn't a good year for it, the other years may be as the software doesn't require OpenGL etc. Some of our labs are also dual-boot for Linux and Windows so I also think VMware View would help with that.
