Virtual PC deployment results

Well, we've had two months almost now to evaluate the deployment of our new public use PCs using VmWare and VmPlayer. The stability has been everything we expected. Shutting down the virtula machine so that it reverts to its original snapshot is turning into a real time saver for my technical staff. It helps our branch staff as well as many problems can be fixed by properly shutting down ad restarting the virtual machine.

There have been some issues we have had to deal with on the VMs. Playback of movies from the DVD drive does not work as the memory and/or resolution required exceeds the capability of the currnet VM technology. External drives do not show up as quickly as would normally be the case. It can take time for a drive to be found by the VM once say a flash drive is plugged in.

On the plus side, the VM machine can do just about anything else a normal PC can. Burning CDs/DVDs, listening to streaming media, playing onloine games all work very well. A furhter advantage is we now should have time to provide quarterly software updates as all we need do is create a new VM with the updates and apply that to each PC - faster even than imaging using Ghost.