Local virtual client

[jahilton2002]

ok this is my first post so sorry if im asking the wrong questions.......

first of;

Hi im John 28 from Atherton, work at a secondary school as a Tech. been readin' this forum for a while now and its help me allot over the past few years its great! (short but sweet)

i have fog installed on site and it works very well...... over 800 pcs on site with about 200 laptops. with about 40 images (due to 32bit/64bit and hardware differences).

we've looked at virtual servers but money is too tight...... i wanted all the staff to have the same pcs so i only had to maintain one image....... this got my thinking......

in my office i run ubuntu as my default os with windows running my admin account in vbox.... works great....

is there anything out there that would allow me to have the pc boot to a vbox like app and load a vdi disk image locally?.

i know i could just use ubuntu like i do in my office...... but dont want a big "fat client" foot print.

so im after something that will boot and make each physically different pc, virtually the same hardware and boot.

dont know why, but im expecting a roastin from you guys so be gentle with me

thx in advance

[MatthewL]

Take a look at using SysPrep, we have one image doing about 15 different make/models. You just need to play about with the drivers bit.

[dhicks]

is there anything out there that would allow me to have the pc boot to a vbox like app and load a vdi disk image locally?

You could simply have a light weight Linux distribution that, on boot, loads up rdesktop full screen and connects to the local Windows virtual machine (using vbox, Xen, KVM, or whatever). Each PC will need a processor with hardware virtulisation support, and I imagine there'll be a bit of a performance / RAM overhead.

[andrew-virtusolve]

XenClient Express - depending on the hardware.

Version 2 has just become available on public preview, ticks all your boxes I think, link here

[jahilton2002]

XenClient Express - depending on the hardware.

Version 2 has just become available on public preview, ticks all your boxes I think, link here

sweet thx for that.. looks like what i need.... can't find the T&cs on the "trial" version..... or a price for that matter.... thx

[Arthur]

I have fog installed on site and it works very well...... over 800 pcs on site with about 200 laptops. with about 40 images (due to 32bit/64bit and hardware differences).

Wow! That's a lot of images. I think you would be better off using MDT and sorting out your drivers (as MatthewL suggested). Are you running Windows 7 on all of your computers?

[andrew-virtusolve]

sweet thx for that.. looks like what i need.... can't find the T&cs on the "trial" version..... or a price for that matter.... thx

Express version is Free, Citrix at the moment give it away and will charge for the synchroniser, there are three main components to the overall solution;

1. XenClient - Endpoint that is stand alone installed on laptop (desktop coming).
2. Synchronizer - XenServer VM that provisions, backs up, manages virtual machines.
3. Citrix Dazzle - Self Service application store.

This old but good blog post explains it

[irsprint84]

sweet thx for that.. looks like what i need.... can't find the T&cs on the "trial" version..... or a price for that matter.... thx

Xen client 1 was free so guess 2 is?

[jahilton2002]

thanks for all the info guys, to answer your question arther we're an XP site

thx again guys