VMware Workstations Shared VMs

NateRUH — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 21:56:53 GMT

Hi Folks, Bit of an interesting one here,

we have serveral labs at the University i work at that use VMs to allow students to work in a safe enviroment as we teach Kali and hacking tools in our Cybersecurity modules.

We use vmware workstation to do this as we can limit access to how the VM's are configured and how they are used, on logoff a script is called that makes sure the vms are stopped and as we use non-persistant disks when the next student logs in they can open vmware and run the shared vm again, and as the host has a dedicated network for that traffic we lock do not allow the students to use the vm in any other mode than bridged to a specific network adapter.

With all that said, I understand that workstation server is depericated is there any other way we could do this, short of creating a ESXI/Vshpere host as im not sure how we would manage that with over 800 students using the labs?

Sorry if i've not be clear If i can awnser anything else please let me know!

Re: VMware Workstations Shared VMs

continuum — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 13:02:57 GMT

For 800 VMs I would highly recommend to consider setting up several ESXi hosts for the job.
If money does not matter - have a look at VMware View - afaik thats called Horizon nowadays.
Thats a complete solution to provide VMs for similar use-cases.
But even regular ESXi can do that

Ulli

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VMware Workstations Shared VMs

Re: VMware Workstations Shared VMs