Ideas for using View with Desktop Reservation System?

[nyplnyc]

Hi,

I'm writting from the New York Public Library; we support roughly 4000 desktops that pretty much identical and are geared for free public use. A customer/patron must reserve a PC for a specific 45min interval using his/her library card. We use a product called Envisionware to do this.

We are thinking about using View in a kiosk model with non-persistent desktops. That is, a user gets a View desktop and upon compleition of their session the desktop is destryoed. Reading through the docs and playing with View in a lab environment I can see how we can accomplish this.

The part I'm missing is how to tie the reservation system into all this. I could have the View Client on the local desktop and have the reservation system handle access to the local desktop, but that means I need to run a full OS on the desktop, have a desktop image that locks down access to nothing but the view client, and manage all that some how, right?

Anyone face similar challenges? How did you tackle it?

Thanks,

Jay

[mreed9]

The option utilized by my company was to use thin clients with a locked down windows xp embedded image providing access only to the view client in order to access the backend vm. Not running a windows based os on the client access device poses a problem as I don't believe there is a linux client available with full functionality. Another key note in deploying a large environment is careful attention to the storage that the desktops reside on.

[nyplnyc]

Cool. Thanks for that. Running something embedded is a good alternative to loading a fat OS. How flexible is the embedded OS? Can install the software required for my reservation system?

Thanks,
Jay

[mreed9]

I'm uncertain about some of the other windows embedded editions but xp embedded is essentially a stripped down version of xp so the same stuff should be installable. I assume you are refering to the PCReservation client which from my understanding would be installed on the virtual machine and not on the access device but even if that is not the case it should be installable on xp embedded.

[npeter]

What about installing this product called Envisionwar in view desktops?

ie, have it installed and configured in master image used for automated pool. will that work?