Hi All
Firstly I am new to virtualization and to servers in general.
I recently started working for a college as a support technician for the computing department. They have bought a Dell PowerEdge T620 which is running ESXi 5.0 for use as a lab environment. I've been tasked with setting up a class set of 20 VMs attached to an isolated network which the students can access and use to perform networking assignments.
I have managed to create the VMs (WIN7 Pro,1.5GB ram,20GB hdd) and connected them to a vSwitch that has no NIC attached but am now running into problems when the students try to access these machines.
Currently we are trying to use vSphere client, each student is given a login in a group with no access to the host but assigned admin rights to 1 VM each. Upon login they can see only the VM they have admin rights to and cannot make any changes to the host or the VM's settings.
The problems start when they try to access the VMs at the same time. They can eventually all logon to the host and start their machines but only 10-12 can see their VMs in the console, either the tab or popout console. The remainder's consoles remain black. What are we doing wrong?
Are their limits to the number of simultaneous console connections through vSphere client?
Is there a better way for the students to access their VMs? We don't want the VMs to have any connection to the college network or the internet at this time.
Any help will be gratefully received.