Virtual Lab Ideas, Planning, etc....

[lhundt]

Hey everyone,

I wanted to open our idea up to the forums to see what kind of ideas and comments I could get regarding our idea of creating a Virtual Lab.

Here is the situation....

I work for Gainesville State College and we are always looking for new technology to offer to our students. We have been throwing around the idea of starting a "Virtual Lab" for students to connect to remotely from home. What we want to do is initially setup 50-60 VMs (Windows XP Pro) to have available for students to Remote Desktop into via RDP.

We have dozens of applications that are available for students in our Physical Labs(Microsoft Office, Math Programs, Physics Programs, Foriegn Language Apps, etc.). If we accomplished this idea of a Virtual Lab, students would be able to access all of these applications from home and it would be the same experience as they would have in our physical labs.

Our Virtual Lab could be a huge hit and would be another useful tool for our students to take advantage of. We are thinking about going with a Blade system to Scale Out our Virtual Lab in the future.

I am very interested in what you guys think about how this should be done. Should we use a connection broker?

Thanks Again!!!

[sgrinker]

Hello

One of the first questions I have would be in regard to the applications. How are the applications currently made available to the students?

\- Installed as needed.

\- Installed on all systems.

\- Remote published application (Terminal Server, Citrix, etc).

You'll definitely want to use a broker in some form for that number of machines, as it will allow you to create pools. Even if you only have one very large pool, it still beats having to manually assign machines to each user. You will probably want to take a look at the new VDM 2.0 from VMWare (http://www.vmware.com/vmworldnews/vdi.html), but remember it's just in beta right now. Otherwise look through other threads here for suggestions on other brokers. Massimo has put together a pretty good matrix here http://it20.info/misc/brokers.htm.

On top of the applications question... do you currently have roaming profiles in place, folder redirection, etc? All of these will help to create a cleaner standardized pool for your classrooms. Although we are getting by without the roaming profiles or folder redirection currently in our training rooms. Granted it's a much smaller scale in our training rooms for each office than a State College.

Thanks

Steve

[lhundt]

All of the applications are pre-installed, and we are not planning on using roaming profiles or folder redirection.

As far as Active Directory problems, how do we go about setting up our master template? Sysprep? Join to Domain....or not?

Do you know if VDM 2.0 can use a web page for assigning VMs?

Thanks for the response!

[sgrinker]

With pre-installed apps and without roaming profiles/folder redirection, you'll probably want to stick with 1:1 assignments. You can still do this with a pool, but the assignement then "sticks" with the user until it is told otherwise. Essentially you...

- create a pool of X machines.

- user logs on for the first time.

- broker assigns a user 1 machine from pool of X.

- user then uses machine and logs off/disconnects

- user reconnects and receives the same machine assigned from the first connection.

Downside here is obviously the number of machines this requires. In your case, I would imagine there is a large number of users. We're in the same boat with the training room portion of our VDI implementation, but again it's on a much smaller scale. The next stage for us is folder redirection and roaming profiles. Along with eventually "virtualized" applications.

Of course if you don't mind profiles getting created on each machine, and have the systems locked down that no customizations can be made... you may be able to get by with a re-usable pool of systems. It all depends on your system configuration and security level on the machines.

From what I've heard of VDM 2.0 it is administered via a web page, but we are still waiting on Beta pilot approval. I haven't seen anything first hand yet.