NComputing X300/Virtual Desktops

If your school’s short on both desktop workstations and cash, consider going virtual. “Virtual desktops” allow a single computer to be shared among several workstations, ideally without users even realizing they’re not on individual PCs.
     My school library’s online research center and dedicated catalog workgroups went virtual in September 2008 when X300 hardware and software were rolled in, along with some recycled mice, keyboards, and monitors. The X300 kits split each of our Dell Optiplex’s Pentium 4, 2.8 GHz processing power four ways, essentially doubling the amount of workstations in the library while cutting the amount of actual computers in half. While that bargain sounds too good to be true, going virtual wasn’t a shift I was initially very comfortable with, nor was it my call. That came from Howell Public Schools’ Director of Technology, Paul Pominville.
     “Cost savings. That was the single most important factor when considering virtual desktop technology,” says Pominville. “At that time we were faced with replacing 182 computers in one of our elementary schools. Many of them were in classroom clusters of four machines each, so the X300 kits, which come with one mini PCI card, software, and three small black-box-type 'access devices,’ were a natural fit. We saved $70,000, enough to outfit a second school.”
     Each X300 access device connects via standard Cat 5 or 6 network cable to a mini PCI card in the shared computer and has ports for connecting speakers, a PS/2 mouse, keyboard, and monitor. The devices draw a miserly one watt of power and generate virtually no heat. “It’s difficult to get hard data on this,” Pominville told me, “but I’m absolutely certain we’re saving money on electricity consumption, too.”
     Now, all this talk about saving green while going green is very kumbaya, but let’s cut to the important stuff: me. Again, I wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of powering my facility’s precious online research center with virtual desktops, even if I got an expansion in the bargain. I’d been tweaking that workgroup for years, it’s the centerpiece of my teaching, and now that it was perfected, I envisioned it being forever hobbled by processors and memory that’d been sliced and diced into feeble dysfunction. And, indeed, my experience with virtual desktops didn’t start off too well. The first thing I noticed was that X300 virtual desktops markedly slow down start up/log-in time—a lasting trade-off, it turned out. I then discovered that about 25 percent of the devices had inoperable mice after start-up. Eventually, I found a document on the NComputing Web site suggesting that changing the video resolution to 1024x768, the highest of two settings supported, would increase the sampling rates to the mouse. Thank goodness that fix worked or this might be a very different review. As it stands, I have X300 virtual desktops, which deliver two low-demand applications—a customized Web browser and our library catalog—and, I must admit, they do so just fine.
     The datasheet for the X300 declares that today’s PCs are like supercomputers. “Compared to the routine demands we typically place on them, I think that’s true,” said Pominville. “Once your operating system is loaded, a processor is typically doing only a small percentage of the workload it can handle. While I wouldn’t recommend them for high-demand apps like video editing or for anything you’d deem 'mission critical,’ we’ve only had one application prove incompatible so far. Actually, I think for any school not to consider virtual desktops seems irresponsible,” he said. “Now that we’ve used them, I expect several schools in the region will follow our lead.”
     I’m now ready to man up, given these austere times, and second that endorsement of the X300 virtual desktop as a budget-stretching measure when used with low-demand applications. Just one caveat: the access devices don’t include USB or Firewire ports. Want even more savings? If you’ve got two mini PCI slots available, you can use two kits to run seven workstations off a single PC. But I’ll let you test those limits, thank you very much.