Currently we use VMWare Ace to package and deploy images to our student computers which then require additional configuration as SysPrep runs. We then snapshot that state so that it can be returned to. But….
VMWare Ace has been discontinued
It has always been buggy causing additional problems and has started to die on us
Our needs are as follows:
Needs to comply with all licensing functions for Windows Software
Would be awesome if this process was relatively quick so we can re-do it every 3-6 months
This would need to account for things like students installing software during class
Thoughts? Comments? Should I head in a different direction?
You can use it in a classroom. You would want to use Linked Clones. It will work the best. We use it at a University in our labs. We thinapp software that is needed.
Photoshop will work, you might need to lock in the PCOIP and enable 3D support in View to give the graphics card more memory.
20k might be a little tight. You are going to want at least 2 host servers with 128gig of ram each. You are also going to want to use Fiber storage with minimum SAS drives.
If you can forgoe all redundancy needs in the environment (IE its one big single point of failure) then I think you could get away with VMware View running a single server and local disks (SSD) for well under 20k and it'd be able to host 16 users. I built my home lab like this for 5k and it'd be able to serve that many users.
I hate to say this on a VMware Forum but have you looked at "competing products". This just seems like a good use case for VDI-in-a-box from Citrix.
Gunnar
Agree 20K would be tight but possible with just local storage. We use View and Linked Clones to server up differnet images depending on the class or lab requirements. Depending on the students rights they see ( or don't see) different pools for which they are member of Active Directory Groups.
We have some lab pools where a student can logon for a day and use as required. Then at night we use powershell with the View Snap In to refresh the desktop pool which put the desktops in that pool back to the same state (we don't do this put you could do this once a week if you wanted instead of every day) and it takes less than 1 min to complete. Others are refreshed as the student logoff so it is the same everytime they logon.
We have SA on our MS licenses so most of the license issue are mute, except when you have thin clients without a vaild OS.