I hope this is a reasonable topic area for my question, which doesn't fall cleanly into anything. My apologies if elsewhere would have been better.
Here's my situation:
I'm the Systems Administrator at a private career college that offers computer and business courses. My current network has about 60 student workstations, 7 staff workstations, 2 Windows 2000 Servers and 2 Linux servers (one running IPCop and acting as our firewall, the other is still being configured but will be our mail and web server). I'm using DeepFreeze on all student workstations so the configurations are reset after each student finishes for the day and I use Ghost 2003 to make master images for building new computers quickly.
The staff machines are fine as they are; it is the student machines that I may want to set up differently depending what suggestions I get here.
The student workstations are running a mixture of Windows 98, 2000, and XP. The hardware is not uniform either, although about 50% of the computers have a similar configuration because they were bought all at once. The other 50% fall into several other general groupings depending on their age. All have MSI motherboards and AMD processors, but they range from less than a year old to about four years old.
The new courses we are receiving from head office have increasingly incompatible configurations. For example, one course for Word XP requires that there are 4 specific contacts in Outlook, the Outlook XP course requires that there are no contacts to start, and our office procedures course requires 3 different contacts. It is impractical to have computers set up that can only be used for one course or another because we would spend all of our time moving students around, which they don't like and it is very time-consuming.
Someone suggested to me that VmWare would be a good solution because we could put one student at a given computer indefinitely and the student would just access whichever image is appropriate for their course. This sounds wonderful, but I'm wondering whether it's really that simple and also whether it can be done more cheaply with something other than VmWare - like Bochs. Cost is a factor and a high initial investment - even if it saves money down the road - may be a hard sell for the franchise owners.
What I need to be able to do for the students is:
-give them a configuration that exactly matches what the workbooks say
-have it act exactly like a regular computer workstation (including sound and CD-ROMs etc) even if it isn't
-have their documents appear to save to local drives as needed (currently they save to floppy disks and network folders)
-have Internet access for the courses that require it
What I need to be able to do for me and the other staff is:
-spend a minimum amount of time configuring computers for new courses that are released
-spend a minimum amount of time moving students around
-be able to easily adapt to shifting student needs (e.g. if one month I have 15 students who want XP courses and 20 who want 2000 then the next month it's 25 who want XP and 10 who want 2000, I don't want to have to constantly rebuild machines)
-spend as little money as possible implementing a solution
I've never used VMWare, Bochs, VirtualPC or anything else like this, so it's all new to me. The idea sounds great, I just don't know whether it's feasible in my situation. I've been asking IT friends questions and reading a bit on the Internet, but it's all a bit overwhelming and I guess I'm hoping someone can sum it all up for me in a way that makes it easier to come up with a workable strategy.
Thanks for any advice/help/recommendation
s you can give me!
Jan
