virtualbox.org

Hi,
I have a VM installed and running on every client in a small business network (~10 clients). The hosts are running Windows 7 Pro with Ubuntu 16.04 guests.
As the load per VM is typically low (some email/Internet access), I would like to migrate them all into a single VM on the server (Windows Server 2012 R2 host/Ubuntu 16.04 guest), that all users can connect to with their Linux credentials. Something like vrdemulticon, but each user should see his own screen. Can this be done at all?
If not - what's the best practice to keep a set of VM's in sync with minimum effort in terms of maintenance? The VM's are configured to restart from a checkpoint.
I apologize if this topic has been covered elsewhere. Any pointer and/or help is appreciated.

Thanks, Joerg

Moved to "Linux Guests".

Please ask yourself what you'd do if it was one physical PC which you wanted to share. VMs are just PCs, so this should take you a long way to answering your own question.

Hint: you can't have multiple PCs all using one hard disk, that would corrupt the disk. If they have separate disks then they can't all be updated by one hardware level action.

AFAIK there is no solution that allows you to let multiple users write to their own disk at will, then update one disk and somehow all the other disks are synchronised without losing data. The only way to get even close is to do it how any normal IT setup would do it: updates pushed from a proxy server. The only other alternative is to periodically scrap the "child" instances and refresh from the parent copy.

Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear enough in what I want to achieve - right now I have n VM's with just a single user per VM. What I want to do is to have n users on a single VM. And each user should be able to connect to this single VM with his or her account, so they don't disturb each other if they share the VM at the same time.

To me that still sounds like exactly the same question as before, which I already answered.

Would something like http://www.xrdp.org/ achieve what you are looking for. I imagine you could set up a suitably configured VM and then use XRDP to create multiple desktops for different users. I have not tried this myself.

It sounds like what the OP wants is a client server model. Doable in a guest but the overhead will probably be too massive for a guest to handle.

I addressed the possibility in my first post that the VM could be shared like any other PC can be shared, but that isn't really a VirtualBox discussion so I didn't address it for long.

@George02... I usually do not quote whole messages, but in this case I think it's necessary:

George02 wrote:Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear enough in what I want to achieve - right now I have n VM's with just a single user per VM. What I want to do is to have n users on a single VM. And each user should be able to connect to this single VM with his or her account, so they don't disturb each other if they share the VM at the same time.

George02 wrote:Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear enough in what I want to achieve - right now I have n computers with just a single user per computer. What I want to do is to have n users on a single computer. And each user should be able to connect to this single computer with his or her account, so they don't disturb each other if they share the computer at the same time.

There... I fixed it for you...

Start thinking along the lines of the 2nd quoted text and you'll see that you do not have a VirtualBox problem, you have a server problem that can support multiple remote logins at the same time. The answer to that will guide you on how to setup your "computer", which could be a VM after all...

@mdsystems - yes, xrdp provides exactly what I was looking for. Thanks a lot for the hint!
@all - thanks for your comments.