Deploying a virutal machine throughout a local network.

[Paul Bunyan]

I'm still learning a number of things about computers as I am still in college, everything I do is just playing around with different configurations and branching off into areas of unfamiliarity.

My question is how schools deploy a VM to their computers? Also, is there a server where all the data for each individual student is kept, like on a server? And is just one server or does it vary on the number of people who are saving to it?

My goal or attempt, is to have something where I have a server, of which I have just built, and load it with Server 2008. Then with the three computers that I've built, I want to load VM's on each computer and I guess have a shared allocated network drive from which each end user computer will access and store data on, but the computer itself will have a significantly smaller drive just for OS and applications, maybe not even applications, and have all the computers share the drives from the server as a storage.

I'm sorry if this is a bit of a longer question, just very curious. Also, if this idea is in lala-land please let me know, or if I'm on the tip of something else relative to it, then please inform me of it! I love learning everything and anything new about computers that I possibly can!

 

[Guest]

I believe it is as simple as either having one powerful VM host(server) and having the workstations connect via VMPlayer or some sort of VM software to access the VM.

 

[Niallenev]

You can run virtual machines on computers using applications like VMware player or Virtual Box. These VM's will sit on top of en existing operating system, so you can run multiple OS's from one computer at the same time. Schools may do this if they are running labs, where the students can make changes to the VM's on thier computers without impacting the host computer. These changes can then be easily reverted using an earlier snapshot of the machine.

Your idea about running three computers with VM's all connected to a share on a server will work. If they are all on the same network, simply create the share on your server and your other computers will be able to use it providing the permissions allow it. If you create a domain on your server and join all the computers and VM's to it, you could push this network share out via Group Policy so it is automatically mapped for the user.