Starting out with VMware View.

[gbablon]

Hello all,

I'm an undergraduate college student just starting out with virtualization and am somewhat at a loss with the products & technologies I should be looking at to fit some specific needs for a project.

I am looking to have a server managing different sessions (virtual desktops) for different users, and then have these users be able to access their sessions, programs and files from other computers / devices (ideally including phones), either through a browser or through some software installed on their machines.

I've been looking at VMware View as being mostly likely the optimal tool for me to use for this. My concern is that I don't actually own a server - at this point I was hoping to make my Vista laptop the "server" and have it manage virtual desktops that I would access from other laptops and ideally from an iPhone. I can't install VMware View Connection Server on a Vista machine though - it requires Windows Server 2003 or 2008. Is there some other tool I should be looking at, or can virtualization only happen on real servers?

Also are there any guides / documents / posts in this forum that you might recommend for complete beginners who lack the expertise of corporate IT people? I can pull my weight programming but am very new to working with network infrastructure / servers / etc and need a little help getting started.

Thank you.

[azn2kew]

Hey welcome to the forum, and these can be accomplish with your laptop with requirements of enough memory and VT enable BIOS. Basically, you would install VMware Workstation 6.5 on your laptop and then download a trial version of VDI 3.0 solution which include all eSX 3.5 components and VDI view 3.0 which does VDI connection for you. All can be run within 4GB of ram and its very straight forward. Download "VDI 2.0 Reviewer's Guide" from Douglas Brown on vmware.com->resources and also look at www.xtravirt.com guide "ESX 3.5 In a Box" which is straight forward. Use your Openfiler for your SAN (iscsi, nfs) as well. Besides VMware VDI, you can look at Citrix Xen Desktop and xen Server is free and good stuff as well and there are 6-7 virtualization players out there you check out Oracle VM, Novell, Solaris Containers, Virtual Iron, Hyper_V, etc..

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant