Virtualized Classroom

[mariottide]

Hallo everybody! I'm a newbie hoping you can help to solve my questions:

1) I work in a school and I've got 80 WindowsXp Pcs in a classroom. They are in the same LAN and used by students in my school.
2) Al Pcs use deepfreeze to come back to their original status every reboot. In any case, updates and new software installations (nothing heavy: little software for class students) are a struggle.
3) I'm thinking to virtualize the classroom. I''ve already have an IBM server with Win Server 2008, not used yet, where I can install virtualbox. Then I can create....one Vm for all PCs? or 80 Vms?
4) Every Pc at startup, with an RDP viewer can use their own Vm.
5) when students logoff, their Vms are stopped and next boot will be like having a virgin machine (sorry for my bad English...).

Do you think it is a good idea? Can you help me to implement this solution? How powered the server should be to manage 80 Vms with XP?

Thanks again and sorry for stupid things I could have written

Mario

[dmcgraw]

80 VMs running XP on one server? You are going to need at least 40 to 50 GB of RAM on it.

[danny_kay1710]

Not just the RAM you would need to make sure that wherever you ran the VM's from the hard drive access was fast.

With 80 running at once other than RAM hard drives is likely the next bottleneck for really slow performance.

Then of course is the CPU, I hope its at least Quad Core (preferably two Quad Cores) and that it supports hardware virtualisation as most modern servers will.

My solution would be to make a virtual pc for every client and just get students to play about with them.

I have setup a similar environment and we ended up using VirtualPC simply because deploying a VirtualPC was two files a .vmc and .vhd and they could be stored anywhere where as VirtualBox's VM's aren't quite that simple.

I made a batch file that would take a Virtual PC VM and copy over the network to clients and set appropriate NTFS security permissions and create shortcuts to them on the students start menu.

I would then use your server as a domain controller to set up a domain and use GPO's to lock down the physical host environment and install any other software they may need (Office, Printers etc) on the physical host rather than installing it on the Guest unless of course it will be needed in the labs.

[mariottide]

thank you both for reply.

Danny I actually think that your solution could be the best compromise, at the moment. I'm going to develop your idea...but why do you say that VirtualBox's VM's aren't quite that simple to store anyway?

[danny_kay1710]

At the time I needed a quick solution.

Virtual PC stores a VM in any folder (and can be easily changed at any point) simply with a .VMC and a .VHD file and if the state has been saved one extra file. They all live in the same folder and don't have to live anywhere in particular. What this meant was I created it once, modified the .VNC file ( it's an XML config file) to remove the Mac Address and copied it round the classrom with a batch file and set permissions (I later developed an app to do this )

I belive VirtualBox stores everything in the userprofile in a .virtualbox folder and from my recollection it wasn't as easy as just copying the files if you wanted to deploy a single machine round the room, nor was it easy for organisation. And you had to put it in the userprofile. We had about 20 Virtual PC's on each workstation and we didn't want them to have to show in the Console or GUI since many students needed access to only one maybe two at the most. We didn't want VPC's stored in the user profile as we wanted them on a separate partition so should windows fail the data is safe prioviding you leave the other partition

With VirtualPC also being free and considering the lack of time I opted to use that. That doesn't mean it couldn't be done with VirtualBox, just I had too many time constraints in order to do it.

I would be interested if anyone did manage something like this to know exactly what they did.

Danny

[jluna]

Hello,
I'm testing VirtualBox 3.0.4 using the PUEL license in a lab of 22 pcs. This will be for training purposes for teachers/administration and not for students. I work for the information technology dept and I was testing VB with our machines. Before we had to create dual partitions then install vista and xp individually and install all drivers and apps for both. Very time consuming. Now, we replaced these pcs with new HP desktops and now we wanted to try virtualization and test vmare which was ok but $$$ and windows own virtual pc 2007 but has extreme problems with usb devices. Now tried VirtualBox and is working awesome. My issue is licensing; our school district is very picky when coming to software licensing when we get audit. I read that it can be used for educational purposes as well but that only for testing purposes. Testing went well. Now, we want to keep this but only for this lab for now. What do you all recommend? Will appreciated it very much.

[Perryg]

Read this http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ and then click on contact us to get in touch with Sun direct. They are the ones that will be able to answer all of your questions.

<snip>
Use at academic institutions such as schools, colleges and universities by both teachers and students is covered. So in addition to the personal use which is always permitted, academic institutions may also choose to roll out the software in an automated way to make it available to its students and personnel.