Hello. I'm a student projecct manager working for Durham Technical Community College's IT department and part of a team trying to construct a remote computing environment. The plan is to integrate the final product with our school's preexisting NetLab infrastructure in order to get the virtual machines that are built, stored and administered there to remotely boot onto the campus labs' physical computers, and the process is one that we've been wrestling with for a couple of months now. Since we're using VMWare utilities for our infrastructure, I thought I would try coming here to get some advice on what methods we could try to achieve our ultimate goal.
The current train of thought we're working on is using Auto Deploy to push a customized ESXi image through PXE to all lab computers, and then (somehow) request the storage server to boot windows VMs on top of the ESXi instances that have just booted. We're looking into PXE chainloading as a way to get to where we want to go, but there's a lot of uncertainty about the process and even if we're asking the right questions as we try to learn and work. If anyone here has any thoughts about the process or tips on where we could look to try to better understand how we can use ESXi / vCenter to get these remote virtual machines to run on a different computer's physical hardware, those pieces of advice would be greatly appreciated.
