Tomorrow I’ll start with the actual installation of VMware View3 at a client. The case for this project is that the client in question needs to be able to quickly provision a sizable amount (30-50 concurrent) of workspaces for training its workforce in two new applications. There was also a need to provide a solution for the workstations of the functional and technical application managers and software testers because one of the new applications (Microsoft Dynamics CRM) is integrated into Outlook on the client side which makes it difficult to switch from the production environment to the testing environment.
After we implement the VMware View infrastructure we will also start working on virtualizing a client/server application that is used for personnel assessments (the ability to destroy a VM after every assessment is important with this one) and there is also a desire to virtualize the desktops of the office bound employees (about 25% of the workforce). Hopefully the ability to take a virtual desktop offline will be production certified soon as the other 75% of the workforce use laptops.
The environment in question consists of Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers that already run VI3. Because these servers have enough available capacity the decision was made to host the virtual desktops on these servers as well. The virtual desktops will be running basic XP SP3, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Dynamics CRM and a .Net 2.0 application. We will start with 384MB and expect to have to size up to 512MB per desktop. The images will be based on an XP image made with nlite (http://www.nliteos.com/).
Documenting a virtualization project 