Training Staff for new O/S with Virtualisation

[deano]

Hi,

To keep costs and workload to a minimum, i would like to utilise virtualisation. We currently have an in house ESX server that is currelty only running a SQL server and SharePoint server. What i would like to do is setup a mini network in a classroom for staff to come in and try the new O/S and get familiar before we change over. My issue arises because i do not want to take over an IT room completely and take it out of action as well as messing around with cables and switches so it creates its own network.

My ideas were to run a virtual server on the ESX setup up with the new GPOs etc and then virtualPC Windows 7 for the training on each PC. This would obviously mean that we would have to copy and install images on all of the PCs. Could we not create an image of a Windows 7 PC on the ESX and connect remotely using some type of viewer from each PC?
Would we also cause issues running another domain temporarily next to the existing? Has anybody got any simple solutions?

[leco]

Could you use virtual desktop? This means staff would log on to a virtual machine from whichever machine they were using. I was thinking of using that myself for training purposes.

[Duke]

We did something vaguely similar with Ubuntu many years back to give kids access to a LAMP stack with a GUI. I just made an image using VMware server (the free, runs-on-Windows one) and we deployed VMware player to the PCs via MSI and the VHD's via a startup script.