Citrix (or another similar product) is exactly what he should be looking into. Downloading entire disk images over a network is just a pain in the ass everytime someone boots. However Citrix isn't the solution to all things, yet it beats VMs for most practical applications.
Er... Why exactly?
A thin linux desktop connected to a backend vmware server would provide exactly what the poster is looking for. Vmware ESX seems perfect for this and eliminates the "download entire disk images" part.
Basically with ESX all of the vm's and associated images live and *run* on the server, the desktop is accessed via vmware-console, a little program that connects to the server and views the virtual machine, similar to citrix/vnc/whatnot. With the clustering solutions available to ESX server and the ability to move running machines between nodes, this seems like a good idea. The only real downside would be if your day-to-day involved 3d acceleration or heavy sound, in which case any solution except a "real" local workstation falls a bit short currently.
I've used such a set up to run a windows desktop for testing, and noticed no slowdown. This is even with 10 or so training and qa machines running on a P3 with 8G of ram and lots of disk. No noticiable slowdown in performance even when the other machines were all doing cpu intensive tasks.
Xen also seems like it's coming along nicely, but doesn't seem ready to provide for windows workstations on this scale, yet.
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Er... Why exactly?
A thin linux desktop connected to a backend vmware server would provide exactly what the poster is looking for. Vmware ESX seems perfect for this and eliminates the "download entire disk images" part. Basically with ESX all of the vm's and associated images live and *run* on the server, the desktop is accessed via vmware-console, a little program that connects to the server and views the virtual machine, similar to citrix/vnc/whatnot. With the clustering solutions available to ESX server and the ability to move running machines between nodes, this seems like a good idea. The only real downside would be if your day-to-day involved 3d acceleration or heavy sound, in which case any solution except a "real" local workstation falls a bit short currently.
I've used such a set up to run a windows desktop for testing, and noticed no slowdown. This is even with 10 or so training and qa machines running on a P3 with 8G of ram and lots of disk. No noticiable slowdown in performance even when the other machines were all doing cpu intensive tasks.
Xen also seems like it's coming along nicely, but doesn't seem ready to provide for windows workstations on this scale, yet.