[svlug] FreeNX , NoMachine and Citrix

[Richard Gardner]

Hola,

Looking to building a proof of concept hopefully by obviating Citrix.

Already Have:

IBM X365 ESX 2.5 server w/
32GB RAM
~ .5TB storage (plans for attaching SAN for add'l storage)
2x Gb/s NICs
Running some GM's of diff flavors of RHEL and Win at the moment.

No problems seen so far.

Want:

To be able to serve 1 VMDK based golden image, and clone it off for
different training platforms.

Examples would be:
Base install for basic training of users
Base install + SAP BW/CRM/EP etc...
Base install w/ our company's product install image 

Vision:

Serve that one VMDK file to training room; 12 pc's + Instructor wkstation as
the distrib point of assignment of the wkstation images.

I have had experience with a VMWare + GoToMyPC + Citrix online training from
Novell; and thought that was a nice idea.  However, each station needed to
already have a base image from which to launch the training image.

Has anyone see a PXE style version setup of this?

I know of Brian Madden (brainmadden.com) and of course we have a contract on
file with a Citrix provider, but I would like to do a "garage make" from
scratch and wow the pants off of people if I can do it solo.

Am fairly handy as long as a tech manual is given and the logistics are
within reach.

Any help appreciate in pointing me in the right direction.  As stated I
would like to stray from proprietary solutions and I know it can be done
purely by loading a base image to boot from then launching VM workstations
of 12 separate "guest" images, but that kills the storage space, and would
require cloning 12 new systems each time, which then leads to 24 stored
images, then 36, etc etc...

Peace =) Richard.