In my lab we have 24 workstations, each with five technician-maintained virtual machines set up in VMware Workstation. These provide a lot of management overhead, as we have to update them as well as the host operating systems every three months (the start of the next quarter), which adds up to 144 systems to update instead of just 24. Whenever we need to reimage the hosts, the VMs add another 130GB to each image, which is over 3TB of extra data to send over the network, and a lot more time to apply each image, and then we still have to boot all 120 VMs and assign them a unique IP Address and host names.
We would like to get the VMs off the hosts and onto a server, but after looking around for a few days, I still don't know where to begin looking for a solution. There may be a better way to do this, but in my mind, the ideal solution would be to replace the VMs on the host machines with five Thin Client operating systems, each configured to connect to a server and be sent or connected to a unique virtual machine. We can't have 120 VMs running on the server all the time, so the server would have to create a copy of the VM from a template whenever a student tries to boot one, and destroy the VM after the student is finished with it.
If there is another client application that has to be installed on the hosts that would be fine, the only reason I'd like to keep them in VMware Workstation is because students already know to look there for the VMs when they need to use them.
What, if any, virtualization software will allow this? Is there some other solution I'm not seeing?
