VDI for home use?

I've got two boys at home that are constantly fighting over the use of my computer. At the moment they are young enough that they aren't playing games that need lots of computer resources. Mostly, one of them is playing games like Runescape and its Moparscape clones. The other plays some more advanced games like Flight Sim X.

After reading this blog site about building a $200 PC I got to thinking if it would be possible to build a cheap PC for the boys and have one of them use a real PC and the other use a XP virtual machine using some kind of cheap windows terminal to connect. I guess the terminal would be the key thing. If it is too expensive you might as well build another cheap PC.

I'll do some more research and post my findings.

Running ESX Server in VMWare Server

After trying to get this running today, I ran into some problems and did some googling tonight to try and find a solution. I found a thread here and a white paper here that document how to do it using Workstation 6 and Intel processors with the VT extensions. Looks like this is the only way to do it and the PE2650s I've got to play with don't have VT. Oh well, I will have to just keep it the lab setup using 3 or 4 real boxes for now.

Virtual Virtualization lab

I'm doing some preparation for some cross training I'm doing on Friday on VMWare Virtual Infrastructure 3. I've used some old servers to create a lab environment consisting of a virtual SAN (using SANMelody) on one to act as an iSCSI target, another server as a VirtualCenter server and two old Dell PE2650s as VMWare ESX 3.5 servers. This works fine for VMotion, DRS, HA and all the other good stuff that VMWare supports but still takes 4 physical boxes, two of which need to be multiprocessor or multicore and have a fair amount of RAM. In a pinch you could get this down to 3 servers if you combined the VC server and the SANMelody server onto one box.

Then I got to thinking, I know people have installed ESX Server as a VM under VMWare Server or GSX Server so would it be possible to create all four machines as VMs on one physical box? This would let me give the two people I am training their own server (the PE2650s) and they could run through the entire setup on their own.

I'm going to have a go myself today and see what happens.