In a classroom setting with ten to fifteen desktop PCs (MS Windows clients) what are the options to allow students to sit and work on either client and have their personal logins and files?
The obvious solution that comes to my mind is using MS Windows Server, create a domain, let the clients join the domain and create users at server level. This solution is beyond our budget (server + windows server license + admin who would set this up).
The dumbest solution that I can think of is setting up ten desktop PCs with two users on each machine (admin plus a user with no password). And let each student sit and work on any machine with the user without password. But this way users won't have their personal settings on the PC. (I could add a NAS file server to the network so that students save their files on their personal space).
What other options are there? Are there Virtualization solutions? Anything else?
In case of the second solution I would have to restore settings every time the PC is restarted (so that a base setting is ensured for every student).