desktop vm's for students (clients) -- im not up to speed with this

[amfony]

hey gang,

 

i was at uni the other day and i had to login into what was a pure *nix lab, now a multiple OS lab (win vista, centos, and another flavour of *nix).

 

Computer booted into what i thought was centos/redhat -- dissapeared (monitor black) for 30 seconds then left me at a OS selector. selecting centos i noticed the OS loading within a window which leads me to think that this was a vm starting rather then parition selector type deal.

 

ive come to the realisation that the base os is a hypervisor type deal or a *nix with custom startup into a vm manager menu. This is pretty sweet! can anyone enlighten me as to:

 

this is popular within schools to provide ms/*nix easily and interchangably
how would you go about deploying a lab like this?
what os would be acting as the hypervisor/base os?
would this make images (vm files) fairly "universal" to maintain (within the same os obv)?

 

thanks guys -- any info / comments greatly apprecaited.

[p858snake]

Some info provided by Rockhurst Uni about their Virtual Desktop environment: Introducing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure | Rockhurst University Computer Services

[andrew-virtusolve]

There is a commercial offering from Citrix XenCLIENT, that is also a Tier 1 hypervisor (bare metal) for the desktop, its very good.

 

Citrix Systems » Desktop virtualization, virtual desktops - Citrix XenClient

 

Even better, the Express version is fully featured and free!

[amfony]

Thanks Guys,

 

Andrew specifically -- that is exsactly what i am referring to. Not to make my clients desktops "thin clients" rather then allow them to leverage VMs opposed to traditional OSes installs. XenClient looks like it can achieve A,B,C of a total solution (with flexcast) but all im interested atm is step A.

 

Thanking you both