Windows VMs for Students Project

Project Scope:

Look into the various issues around providing prepackaged Windows VMs to students

Project Goals: Answer the following questions:

• Can we produce a VM that is joined to the domain? What are the issues related to this?
  NOT in a useful fashion.  Unique SIDs along with long installation times make this not viable for the VM living on student machine model running through VMware Workstation/Fusion.  A Virtual Desktop Infrastructure could deploy such functionality but has significant server requirements and involves much more maintenance than we can achieve at this time with available resources.
• Any advantages to Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 in this model?
  Windows XP would be the best place to start
• Does our student MSCA licensing allow us any options to make Windows VMs available to students?
  Yes, under the MSCA we can have up to 4 Windows virtual OS installed on a student or staff machine.
  • What if they are in the domain? - see above question about domain
  • What if we charge a per-head fee?  - license is not effected by whether we charge or not
  • What if they are locked down somehow? - more important for individual application licensing since we are allowed to have Windows virtual OSes
• Does VMware allow virtual machine changes while the VM is shut down, that could be done via scripting or an MSI or installer wrapper? For example, could we change the MAC address?
  Some VM configuration, such as MAC address can be configured by modifying the VMware configuration files which are separate from the VDK (virtual disk).
  Apply Windows patches would require either replacing the VDK with a patched version or running a patch management within the launched VM.
• How big would a useful VM storage be? Could it fit on an 8GB thumb drive? 16GB?
  16 GB is the realistic minimum we should consider for an Windows XP VM with the types of applications we want to deploy  

Project Lead:

Jonathan Hunt  

Timeline:

2-3 weeks starting June 22, 2009

Deliverable:

Report with detailed answers to the questions for later use by Duncan Kincaid and Jim Cain.