Idea for setup in the future...

Draygoes

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Talking in another thread about my old school and how they had their systems set up, I was reminded of an idea that I have been playing around with for when Cynthia and I get our own place.

The idea is actually pretty straight forward. I want to buy a powerful, yet easily upgradable server, install a VM Server OS on it, and buy a couple of laptops. On the laptops, I want to install nothing but a client to interface with the VM software on the server. If possible, I would like the clients to be the OS's installed on the computers to make things even more simple, but I am not adverse to stripping windows down to only the essentials and run the clients from there as well.

The idea is this. One of us picks up a laptop (both will be exactly the same), and remotes in to our own personal VM on the server. The thought behind this is that we get all of the power from the server, and the flexibility to access our own personal OS's from the laptops, or even remote locations.

There actually is a few questions behind this, but I am not looking for any major type of instruction, so I felt like I should just park this thread in Off Topic for now. (Although suggestions are more than welcome...)

Do you guys think that this has any decent possibilitys, or am I headed down the completely wrong path? I am hoping that once logged into the guest OS on the server, it will behave exactly like it would if installed natively, but with way more power because of the extra hardware. What do you guys think?
 
So... no thoughts at all? I really want to improve this idea, or if I am on the wrong path, I would like to know before I go through the trouble of making this happen...

Sorry for the bump, but its been a while with no responses, and I thought that I would give this one last try before letting it fall into oblivion.
 
I'm not sure I see an advantage for you in doing this. The server may be powerful, but a VM's performance running on that server would not match the performance of the same software running on the laptop. Remember that a VM emulates the hardware and will be running your installed software on that emulated hardware and not the powerful hardware of the server.

My company uses a similar setup for our development test machines. We don't do this to be able to use a low powered client to control a more powerful host but it allows us to have many different test machines (multiple VMs) without having to have as many physical machines. A server with 10 VMs is actually less expensive and takes up much less space than 10 physical machines. The tradeoff is that the VMs lack the performance of a physical machine.
 
So, no matter how powerful the server is, I cannot draw from that power in the VM's to have a lower power laptop working at a higher level? Oh well, at least I know now.
Thanks for the answer friend. :)
 
It's possible, if you used a very low power laptop or a netbook, that the VM would have better performance but other than that, no.
 
Alright, thanks again friend. :)
I will just use an older computer as a server then and have it distribute media like I am doing now.
 
Rather than VMware you want to be looking at Citrix Xenapp (previously called presentation server and before that metaframe)

in this way you can run a program (say for example Auto CAD - which requires lots of resources).
that runs on the server
and your crummy laptop just displays screen data and relays commands, except rather than that all being on the server and in a remote desktop client window Citrix can be a seamless experience. it behaves like it's running on your existing laptop, you can even put the short cuts to it on the start menu.
 
I have no experience with Citrix software but my guess is that it would be a pretty expensive solution to what Draygoes is proposing, especially for just 2 users.
 
hugely expensive.

it starts around $400 per socket on the server.
then you need terminal server licenses as well (£80 per license)
and xenapp connection licenses (£120 per license)

Microsoft terminal server has really come along though, and is a pretty good (though not seamless) solution now. (as in the webapp version)
 
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