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Teaching Computer Classes With One Computer

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  • Science
  • Computers
  • Business Computing
Last response: in Business Computing
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September 18, 2013 11:39:48 PM

First, let me start off with saying I know how computers work and I have work with and studied them for a long time now, but I don't know that much about VM or what it requires and the strain it would put on a computer.

I have a friend that teaches a computer science class at the high school level. He currently use about 30 cheap low end dells for the class. But I was curious if he could have one very powerful computer doing all of the lifting. Could he use one very high end system with multiple monitors keyboards and mice all hooked up to it and having it run multiple versions of win 8?

First, is it possible?

Second, what would be required for something. That could run 20-30 versions of windows 8?

Third, is it reasonable to do something like this?

More about : teaching computer classes computer

September 18, 2013 11:57:10 PM

I don't think it'd be possible, you'd be running a server or something if you wanted to do that. Probably a very expensive one. Then theres the fact you'd need to buy license' for 20-30 windows 8 it'd get pretty damn expensive.
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September 19, 2013 1:06:29 AM

Hi
I did a spell of tech support in a school that used thin clients (severely cut back PCs)that were networked to servers.
Because the thin clients were continually accessing the hard drives on the server the system would run very slowly.
I really doubt that you could get a server powerful enough (30 monitors off one PC anyone)that would be faster during multitasking than 30 discrete PCs.
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September 19, 2013 6:21:05 AM

dreamerz said:
I don't think it'd be possible, you'd be running a server or something if you wanted to do that. Probably a very expensive one. Then theres the fact you'd need to buy license' for 20-30 windows 8 it'd get pretty damn expensive.


Yes I know I would be running a server and it would be expensive, but is it possible?
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September 19, 2013 6:25:55 AM

makkem said:
Hi
I did a spell of tech support in a school that used thin clients (severely cut back PCs)that were networked to servers.
Because the thin clients were continually accessing the hard drives on the server the system would run very slowly.
I really doubt that you could get a server powerful enough (30 monitors off one PC anyone)that would be faster during multitasking than 30 discrete PCs.


Well, last year I put together a computer on a 20k budget that would have enough ram for 4.5gb per person, 1tb hdd per person and 1-2 theads per person.

What if I scaled back to 16 computers running from this one server?
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September 19, 2013 6:44:56 AM

I think your main problem would be outputting to that many monitors you would need 5 eyefinity graphics cards each with 6 outputs to get the 30 monitors,I only know of motherboards being able to support up to 4 GPUs.It may be feasible on the graphics front if you scaled it back then it would only need three GPUs.
I cant see how you would run multiple copies of windows on the same machine each one with a different mouse and keyboard after all you are not networking it but setting up a huge KVM system.
Perhaps Linux may offer a solution.
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September 19, 2013 7:02:06 AM

makkem said:
I think your main problem would be outputting to that many monitors you would need 5 eyefinity graphics cards each with 6 outputs to get the 30 monitors,I only know of motherboards being able to support up to 4 GPUs.It may be feasible on the graphics front if you scaled it back then it would only need three GPUs.
I cant see how you would run multiple copies of windows on the same machine each one with a different mouse and keyboard after all you are not networking it but setting up a huge KVM system.
Perhaps Linux may offer a solution.


AMD has some FirePro cards that each have 6 minidisplay port outputs and I could get a 1-2 splitter for them so I could support 48 monitors of 4 cards.
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September 19, 2013 7:40:23 AM

Looking at the specifications for the top end Firepro card it appears to limit you to a max of 6 independent monitors per card, this is no doubt due to bandwidth limitations of the card.
I think more than one copy of windows running on a machine would cause a lot of conflicts in areas like memory addresses in RAM and USB controllers.
The only way I could see this working would be to use a custom designed operating system that could accomodate multiple independent inputs and outputs.


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September 19, 2013 7:50:41 AM

makkem said:
Looking at the specifications for the top end Firepro card it appears to limit you to a max of 6 independent monitors per card, this is no doubt due to bandwidth limitations of the card.
I think more than one copy of windows running on a machine would cause a lot of conflicts in areas like memory addresses in RAM and USB controllers.
The only way I could see this working would be to use a custom designed operating system that could accomodate multiple independent inputs and outputs.




Ok, well could I do a modified version of this instead, where the server would do all I the heavy lifting and we could use smaller, slower computers to handle all of the I/O and the OS?
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September 19, 2013 8:11:54 AM

This is the idea behind the thin client system and it does work to an extent but due to the limits of ethernet 10/100 Mbps or even Gigabit 1000Mbps as you add more computers the network slows down due to the amount of information flowing between the server and the clients.
I can tell you from experience that 30 clients to one server on 100Mbps leads to slow running.
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Best solution

September 19, 2013 9:33:28 AM

I think there are two completely different architectures being discussed here. The first mentioned and discussed is a thin-client remote-desktop style of terminal services, while the second that got mixed in there was a directly-connected multi-monitor setup which is rather new and very limited.

First the question: Is this possible? Yes. Using a single server to run multiple virtual machines which are accessed through remote desktop via thin clients (or even using your older computers as "thick" clients) is definitely doable. There's a lot that goes into this, though, beyond just the server hardware. Yes, getting a server system that's capable of running 30 simultaneous Windows 8 environments for users is going to be quite hefty. Especially having your storage system fast enough to handle that much IO. But the other problems come in with your network. Your infrastructure is going to have to be able to handle all of those connections, so if your server only has a single gigabit connection for 30 connections, you're not gonna have a good time.

Then there's licensing costs, etc. and by the time you get everything together for your network and server to accomplish this, you're going to be spending about the same as buying 30 individual cheap computers. However, Remote Desktop probably isn't going to function as well on the graphics side as having just an individual standard desktop computer environment. Definitely something to take into consideration.

There's a lot of different technologies and software systems available to achieve what you are looking at doing. Microsoft RemoteFX with Remote Desktop Session Host solutions, or VMWare View are the main ones that come to mind, but either way it's not cheap, and it takes a lot of know-how to get this set up just right.
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November 10, 2013 4:02:25 PM

I've seen it done at National American University. It took years and many millions of dollars to pull it off. This is not a project for a high school teacher to put together out of his/her own pocket.

--Andy
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November 12, 2013 10:52:10 AM

The easier and cheapest solution would to be to have a central server running Hyper-V 2012. From there, you can setup on that server all the virtuals you want. Using your low end computers, they could RDP (remote desktop) to their respective VM for whatever purpose.
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