Virtual Machine Reservavtion Software

[mrtba]

Good evening,

I have been tasked with taking about 20 high end desktops into our virtual world.  This poses a few challenges.  Mainly these machines are in conference rooms and are reserved via our Lotus Notes software.  We would like for our users to have the ability to reserve these high end machines in VMware view.  Does anybody have any suggestions?

We could do a 1 for 1 swap and that works fine but what we would like to do is add a pool of new machines that you can reserve for big meeting setups.  We design power plants so our models get quite large.  We are also planning on using VGX for video.  I wonder if there is any software where you could run thru a wizard and reserve machines.  That would be ideal.  Then maybe spit out a temporary link to machine based upon the time that you reserve the machine from.

Thanks in advance,

Tim

[Linjo]

I do not know of any existing solution to do this but a simple idea would be to use 10 pools with one desktop in each pool, non-persistant, and then use AD to control the access to these desktops.

There is plenty of software or scripts out there that can easily add and remove memberships in the AD-groups.

The question will be what to do when at end of the reservation, should the session be aborted and given to the next user or should it be a grace period, not sure how to handle that one.

// Linjo

[mrtba]

Thank you Linjo,

That is what I have come up with as well. I was hoping somebody would have done something like this already.  I would imagine if I start digging into the development kits I coud write some software that could possibly do this.  I'm not sure if it's at all possible yet.  They want this done by Wednesday so I don't think I will be able to work that miracle!