VMware at home (newbie)
Let me tell you about what I’m trying to achieve, and hopefully some of you smart people out there will be able to help me out:
At home, my family has many computers and they are all getting kind of old. I’m hoping to invest in one decent system and have the whole family share it. If I’m not mistaken, I think it is possible to setup one physical machine, have many virtual machines within that machine, and have everyone be able to access their machines at once from their rooms. Basically what I want is for the central machine to replace all the other machines, for the one machine to do all the processing, storage, etc, and for everyone in the family to be able to use that machine at any given time from their rooms.
Which VMware product would be best suited to meet my objectives, and are there any guides online for doing such a setup? Also, if you could comment on whether my idea is practical or if there is a better way to do this than replacing all my systems at home, it would be greatly appreciated.
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are you planning on using their existing machines as terminals for accessing your new computer? Well, I dont know if VMware is the way to go, my experience with VMware is that you use it from a single machine (i.e. single keyboard, monitor) in situations where you want to be able to simulate several operating systems on that single machine.
The thing with having a bunch of terminals and a single server is that you are faced with the old ‘fat client’ or ‘thin client’ situation.
Thin client Unix:
If you run linux on your new fast server then you could have those old computers hook up via a small LAN and use telnet type tool to log in from a command line and access the fast server through a text command line (thin client) the benefit of this is that those old computers dont need much cpu power at all to make it work, the down side is that all you get is text and everybody needs to know linux text tools, and unless you are a family of software engineers this isnt likely….
Fat client unix:
If you want ‘full screen’ access then you will need somekind of graphical operating system interface tool that works over networks… possibly something like X windos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System) but again this is linux/unix based stuff…
MS PC
If you run Remote Desktop Connection or Windows Desktop Sharing you can get the GUI interface, but I havent used these tools and dont know how to set them up or how much they cost. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Desktop_Connection#Remote_Desktop_Connection) piperj01