By Jeffrey Hastings -- School Library Journal, 2/1/2009
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com
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.