-1

I have to set-up and configure a computer classroom on my university, which will consist of 15 machines running Windows 10 (OEM). I need a bunch of software requiring installation (eg. MATLAB, Python, R etc.) to be available on each workstation. How can I make it in such a smart enough way that I won’t have to install all those programs individually on each machine?

Is it possible to install all the programs on a separate partition of Computer #1 and then somehow clone this partition to all the other computers? If so, using which tools?

I don’t need any “complete bit-to-bit copy of the whole OS”, just a copy the software. Of course I have a classroom license for all the programs such as MATLAB.

Paweł Kłeczek
  • 603
  • 1
  • 5
  • 28
  • 1
    I'd say this belongs to SuperUser. That said, there are millions of options: make a shared network folder with the installers, and a `.cmd`/`.bat` script to call them in silent mode one after another for example. Active Directory based installation. Virtual machines with identical setup for everybody (after the classes, to be reset to a snapshot). The list goes on. – Tomasz Gandor Feb 04 '17 at 17:51
  • @Tomasz, thanks for giving me some hints. I started reading about virtual machines (on the example of VirtualBox) and do I understand correctly that I can just install VBox on each computer, then install all the software on one computer, take a snapshot of that system configuration, and finally copy the snapshot file to all other computers - and after I run that snapshot it will do exactly what I need? – Paweł Kłeczek Feb 04 '17 at 18:09
  • Exactly. The physical computers (called hosts) only need to have VirtualBox and the snapshots. – Tomasz Gandor Feb 04 '17 at 18:16
  • Niec! So.. my last question (for the time being) is: I read that there are three commonly used virtualization solutions: VirtualBox, VMWare and Hyper-V. Hyper-V is type 1 hypervisor, so it's rather not what I want (since I need access to all features like USB, sound etc.), a similar case for VMWare (it's a bare-metal environment). But is there any other option apart from VirtualBox worth considering? – Paweł Kłeczek Feb 04 '17 at 18:41

1 Answers1

0

VirtualBox suited my needs perfectly, so I consider this issue resolved.

Paweł Kłeczek
  • 603
  • 1
  • 5
  • 28