[K12OSN] LTSP and virtualization

Rob Owens hick518 at yahoo.com
Wed Oct 4 21:34:40 UTC 2006


I'm trying to figure out the most cost effective way
of "upgrading" about 10 Windows computers at work. 
The machines are all Pentium 3's running Windows 2000,
with 128MB RAM.  The latest anti-virus package,
imposed by our parent company, is causing these
machines to slow down so much that they are borderline
unusable.

One thought I had was to set up an LTSP server that
uses VMware or Qemu to run Windows 2000 on Linux.  (I
have enough Windows licenses to cover all the
potential users).  Would this work?  Would my server
load running 10 instances of virtualized Win2k be 10x
the load of running just one?  Or would I benefit from
the sharing of memory, processes, etc?  Would I need
to load 10 separate Windows images on the server, or
just one?

Another possibility is booting off an LTSP server and
using that to initiate a session on our existing
Windows Terminal Server.  This will require that we
buy more licenses ($75/user, I'm told), and may or may
not require a hardware upgrade to the server.

The most boring option is to buy new desktop machines
w/ no OS and install Win2k on them using our existing
licenses.  (The old desktop machines will be
decomissioned).  I'd really like to expose the users
to Linux, and that makes this option even less
appealing to me.

So, what does everybody think?  Any other ideas?

Thanks

-Rob



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 




More information about the K12OSN mailing list