Anyone know much about desktop virtualisation? (VMWare etc)
 

Hello,

We currently have a scenario of multiple desk stations, each with 4 rackmount PCs. These display to 4 monitors, but a single keyboard and mouse are used to control them via a KVM. Due to the nature of some of the apps running on the screens, they need to be different installations of Windows.

What I want to do is replace the 4 PCs at each desk, with a single machine running virtual machines - but I would like it to function in the way the current ones do - i.e. the display is always open on each machine's screen, but you can select KVM position.

At a push maybe we could run the multiple monitors as an extended desktop on the VM host and run a diff VM window on each monitor.

Any thoughts?

I've played with VMWare a bit and I think what you're trying to achieve is quite easy.

It depends on the VM software you're using but I have used VMWare server. You basically setup your virtual machines or even convert your physical ones. These are then started via the control panel and remain running unless you shut them down. You switch windows to give you the machine you want to control and then use the display, keyboard and mouse as normal.

You sometimes have to tweak the display settings etc but it's nothing too taxing :)

Hope that helps - sorry for not being too technical but my experience is from a practical viewpoint (having run 3-4 machines in the past).

The alternative option would be to run ESxi server. This is a 'barebones' server and doesn't require a host OS. The downside to this is that the machines are created, run and accessed on another PC terminal, allbeit sitting on the ESxi server.

Hope that helps and makes sense!!

Jai

Not sure about the KVM route, but you could certainly use the extended desktop with a remote desktop into each virtual open permanantly on each monitor (you'll obviously need the pc to have outputs for each monitor). I guess the benefit with this is that it will all look seamless and you'll be able to move (mouse/keyboard) between servers without having to manually select a different KVM position.

Not 100% sure, but won't this be possible under windows 7 and the integrated virtualisation they use for XP mode. I know that you could run at least 1 xp virtual machine with and application installed on that which would appear to be running natively to the host desktop. The host desktop would need to have the 4 monitors attached.

Alernatively VMware workstation or even player would allow the multiple OS's to run and be a windows app that could be positioned anywhere on the 4 monitors of the host machine.

I figured it would be this way. I think I'd rather get VMWare than trust Windows to do it.

Unless things have changed in the latest version of VMware Workstation, i don't think that you can open separate "console" windows across an extended (or even single screen) desktop display? :(

mb

You can, we've been testing it! But unfortunately you cannot "lock" them to specific screens.

Got a server to run esxi on? Run all the vms off of one central machine and then each desk
has a single pc used just for remote desktop onto which ever vm is needed. If need 4 vms open have 4 screens with a remote desktop session per screen.