Lab advice

[hobo]

Hi all

I have a requirement to create a lab environment for some call centre staff. The choices I can think of at the moment are to either host a VMWare server and multiple VM's from that. Or alternatively give each agent VMWare workstation and their own set of VM's.

For the server option, I would expect users to use remove control to use the VM they needed. However, is there any remote control tools out there which would tell a user that someone was already connected and/or who that person was? I don't want to just use Windows remote desktop as the second user would just cut off the first. In a call centre environment this would cause problems.

For the VM Workstation option, my concern is over licensing. If an agent's PC has Windows XP Pro or Vista Business edition running, how many VM's is he/she allowed to run/install? So say that user has 15 images, do I need to buy 15 additional OS licenses PER user!?!? That would frankly sound ridiculous!

Any advice gratefully received.

Thanks

[Svante]

Hi Hobo,

One idea could be to use VMWare workstation or Server to create virtual machines, and then give them to users and let them run them through VMWare Player (which is free). They won't be abe to create new machines that way, but maybe that is not needed?

[Ken_Cline]

For the server option you would want to use a connection broker so that each user would be directed to a different VM. See http://it20.info/misc/brokers.htm and http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=52418&tstart=0 or just http://www.google.com/search?q=vdiconnectionbroker

[dsanders]

Yes you will need OS licenses for each instance. I do not know of a limit on the number of virtual machines that a user can run. However, you will have to have a pretty beefy box to run 15 machines at the same time.

I would also consider terminal server.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

We setup several ESX servers that had on them instances of every OS we supported. I think at one time there were 30+ flavors of Linux and several of other things on one host.... The idea was that there was a bootable VM for everyone to use via VC. If someone needed a version of say RHEL U5 they would deploy from template it to their an available system.

Granted we had more than enough host capacity.

I am not sure Workstation is the best approach and VMware Server has its own limitations.

Best regards,

Edward