Virtual desktops on a shared server

lunacyfoundme

I'm doing some research for a school that was offered a service whereby network monitors would connect to a server to provide virtual desktops for students to use.

Does anyone have any technical information on how these work? The the students till have their own logins, profiles and documents folders or is it the same desktop environment and settings for every connected user.

Gone Drinking

Its called VDI. I personally think its the way forward.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_virtualization

Dravokivich

The most common service type for that kind of setup that ive seen is citrix. We use it in work and our clients use it as well. The server acts as a host for virtual machines. You can then create multiple login ids for it. So a seperate account can be pro ided to each user. Each login will crwate a profile on the vm, similar to a windows user profile, so they'd be logged into their own instance.

The client software for acessing citrix, works in the same manner as remoting into a pc. Access can be done with firewall rules or domain settinga if the vm is going to be windows based.

But overall whats mentioned abive in the firat paragraph is the basic idea of it.

lunacyfoundme

Thanks for that information.

From your description it seems like the virtual desktops are in essence entirely separate virtual PCs hosted on specialised server.

The system we were informed of was for 3 virtual desktops running off a W7 server.

I understand that you can use Virtual PC on Windows 7 to create VMs in the same way as a larger scale system like Citrix. I presume then you'd still need to buy separate licenses for the OS' on the VMs?

Dravokivich

Dunno man. Youll need to check with that and see what your vendor is providing, if the os for vm is included in the license, and if the license is for the number of VMs hosted on the server, or combination of the number if VMs/servers, or number of users.