Reply to post: Sounds over-complicated and high-risk, I'm afraid...

Sounds over-complicated and high-risk, I'm afraid...

There are some additional risks that others have not mentioned - mostly related to that fact that you are looking at a customer-specific solution. Firstly, even as a volunteer your time is valuable and you are likely to spend many hours getting a setup based on creaky old desktops to work. Then there is the problem of the *sysadmin* becoming the single point of failure - i.e. it will be really hard for someone else to support a bespoke system that has been cunningly constructed to minimise costs, especially as it may be complex/creative and therefore time-consuming to document fully. And of coure the creaky old desktop hardware remain creaky old hardware.

This is a "Been there, done that, got the T-shirt" comment - I personally have made all the above mistakes (though not with VDI), and in the long run really regretted taking that approach.

If I were in your situation I'd look at replacing the desktops with three year old ex-corporate machines (Windows 7 licensed). If you can get Windows 7 licenses from CTX for a couple of pounds each, you could look for early Core2 machines that are contaminated with Vista licenses. The key thing here will be to get machines that are similar enough that you can support them with a single image. I think you have a fighting chance of finding *free* machines of this era - what you would have to do is upgrade the RAM and if possible the disk drive (which is the main performance bottle-neck in these systems). For older machines I'd also look at replacing the fans.

The standard-image desktop approach works well for us, as we can have a couple of machines on the shelf "ready to roll" so that if a machine dies when I'm not around, it can be swapped for a working one and no-one's work is affected (assuming they have played ball and kept their stuff on the server).

BTW for servers our entire setup is open-source, using DRBD for server-to-server replication (ask if you want more info). Servers for the users are virtualised using KVM, and virtual disks are mirrored by the VM hosts - so the users' servers don't need any funky configuration for data redundancy.