training room - thin clients?

I'm looking into setting up a small computer network with about 8 nodes, and was thinking it would handy to do it with a bunch of thin clients and one server, serving a standardised VM instance to each thin client. This makes it easy to maintain, re-image, manage, monitor, etc. Each node would be used for basic computing - surfing/email/office/training.

I'm just wondering if this approach is a realistic alternative to using a bunch of standalone PCs, and if so, where's a good place to source the required hardware? The VMs would be windows XP or 7. Would I be best running a linux box running virtualbox, or a windows server with VMware, or maybe the Citrix route?

A lot of questions in there I know - I'll be happy if I just get a link or two to relevant resources, as my googling skills are letting me down on this quest.

Static M.e.

Training room, thin clients.. all sounds good to me.

Vmware view is suppose to be very good on a LAN, but poor over a WAN. So I would start by looking up Vmware View, with Vmware you will also get a lot of support and doc's which helps.

You could have all PCs just using 1 image, when they reboot they lose all changes, it works quite well.

I havent used thin clients so this is all just what I've heard...

With VMware you can trial the software as well.

BTW Citrix are all the leaders in Thin Clients, you should take a look at what they offer.

Thanks for that. I have a lot of research to do!