All of the arguments that I have read on this thread about VMware having poor performance are laughable at best. I don't mean to disrespect anyone, but running VMWare Workstaton on your laptop or desktop PC with a single hard drive is ALWAYS going to have poor performance. Remember - you have two operating systems that are trying to access the same drive. That is a good example of I/O contention.
VMWare workstation was never tuned to provide top performance. Running it on a box with good I/O bandwidth and memory will help to mask this. VMware server products (especially ESX), running on REAL server hardware (that is designed properly for VMWare) will perform much better than you think. This is why businesses across the planet are consolidating their servers, with a 20:1 ratio being pretty normal.
ignorance must be bliss... if you think that all things microsoft are insecure and linux/oss is secure by default - i have a bridge to sell you. get a clue dude.
vmware runs notoriously slow on laptops because laptop hard drives generally run at 4200rpm - or 5400rpm if you have a higher end model. i've heard of 7200rpm laptop hard drives, but they'll probably make you impotent after using it regularly. try an external usb or firewire hdd, and you'll have better luck.
vmware is much like any i/o intensive application - it will run like sh!t on a laptop...
One of the first things that I learned in IT is the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid). Your idea can work, but it sounds overly complex and will most likely lead to a very complex problem down the road. You're talking about using a Host OS, Guest OS, and a Server OS that will be hosting the Guest OS images... that's lots of places where things can go wrong.
Doing a Citrix or some other terminal services based solution may work for you - but it depends a lot on your apps. At my place of work, Citrix is used a lot for apps that need to be run in a centralized location. At the same time, we have a number of apps that don't play nicely with Citrix because of how they're coded. I don't know the exact issue, but it is something along the lines of not liking several versions of the same.exe image running on the same system.
If you do have apps like this, doing a hosted desktop solution may work for you. VMware is really pushing this type of solution lately - putting many desktop OS's on a centralized ESX server. ESX is rather expensive, so I'm not sure if it would be a good idea or not - but so is a Citrix or Windows Terminal Server based solution. For just the cost of a XP license per user, you could setup VMware server on Linux with a bunch of XP guests running on it. VMware says that their "free" server product isn't meant for production, but it may work well in this case. You could even buy support from them and use Virtual center to move XP guests from one server to another so you can perform maintenance.
In any case, I would recommend that you load up a few boxes with different solutions and test out peformance of your apps.
There are a lot of options for your end-user workstations. PXE booting a small-linux OS with a terminal server, VNC, or vmware client would work very nicely - as would a similar local install... YMMV
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All of the arguments that I have read on this thread about VMware having poor performance are laughable at best. I don't mean to disrespect anyone, but running VMWare Workstaton on your laptop or desktop PC with a single hard drive is ALWAYS going to have poor performance. Remember - you have two operating systems that are trying to access the same drive. That is a good example of I/O contention. VMWare workstation was never tuned to provide top performance. Running it on a box with good I/O bandwidth and memory will help to mask this. VMware server products (especially ESX), running on REAL server hardware (that is designed properly for VMWare) will perform much better than you think. This is why businesses across the planet are consolidating their servers, with a 20:1 ratio being pretty normal.
ignorance must be bliss... if you think that all things microsoft are insecure and linux/oss is secure by default - i have a bridge to sell you. get a clue dude.
vmware runs notoriously slow on laptops because laptop hard drives generally run at 4200rpm - or 5400rpm if you have a higher end model. i've heard of 7200rpm laptop hard drives, but they'll probably make you impotent after using it regularly. try an external usb or firewire hdd, and you'll have better luck. vmware is much like any i/o intensive application - it will run like sh!t on a laptop...
One of the first things that I learned in IT is the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid). Your idea can work, but it sounds overly complex and will most likely lead to a very complex problem down the road. You're talking about using a Host OS, Guest OS, and a Server OS that will be hosting the Guest OS images... that's lots of places where things can go wrong.
.exe image running on the same system.
Doing a Citrix or some other terminal services based solution may work for you - but it depends a lot on your apps. At my place of work, Citrix is used a lot for apps that need to be run in a centralized location. At the same time, we have a number of apps that don't play nicely with Citrix because of how they're coded. I don't know the exact issue, but it is something along the lines of not liking several versions of the same
If you do have apps like this, doing a hosted desktop solution may work for you. VMware is really pushing this type of solution lately - putting many desktop OS's on a centralized ESX server. ESX is rather expensive, so I'm not sure if it would be a good idea or not - but so is a Citrix or Windows Terminal Server based solution. For just the cost of a XP license per user, you could setup VMware server on Linux with a bunch of XP guests running on it. VMware says that their "free" server product isn't meant for production, but it may work well in this case. You could even buy support from them and use Virtual center to move XP guests from one server to another so you can perform maintenance.
In any case, I would recommend that you load up a few boxes with different solutions and test out peformance of your apps.
There are a lot of options for your end-user workstations. PXE booting a small-linux OS with a terminal server, VNC, or vmware client would work very nicely - as would a similar local install... YMMV