I am using a VMWare View Deployment at a jail, with aproximately 120 users on 3 rotating shifts.
We are using PanoLogic Zero Clients that first authenticate to the pano controller, which in turn hands off the session to the VMWare View broker.
Because we have 3 shifts, it makes sense to time out logins and shut down the machine. There are usually only 20 sessions on concurrently, and keeping 120 vm's going requires quite a bit more backend power than necessary. We set the machines to power down after 3 hours of inactivity. This seems to be great as far as resources are concerned, but we are having issues with the handoff from the pano controller to the VMWare View broker. If a machine is powered up, there is no problem at all. If a machine is powered off, the pano controller notifies the View broker to start the machine, which most of the time happens correctly (rarely we get a stuck machine).
The problem starts here. While the machine is booting, the Pano session just blanks the screen. There is no notification of what is happening in the background. If the bootup takes more than a couple minutes, the pano times the session out bringing the user back to the login screen. Average login times are 5+ minutes for the initial login of the day. Subsequent logins are almost instantaneous if the machine is still in a powered on state. Sometimes it locks the users out completely. This is confusing to the users and requires constant intervention by IT.
I have contacted PanoLogic, and I don't think they are going to have a quick resolution on this issue. I was wondering, if in the interim, is there a way to power machines on by a schedule through VMWare view. This way I can power on heavy used machines an hour before a shift starts. My only other resolution would be to double the size of our VDI Cluster for this project, and that's something we wouldn't be able to budget for until next year.
