[H-GEN] Dealing with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)

[Rick Phillips]

I work for a very large organisation which has a huge expenditure in
laptops and PCs.  Due to looming money restraints, we are faced (as
techs) with dealing with large numbers of various BYOD units of the PC
(not Mac) type which we are told will start to appear.

Our initial thoughts are to provide employees with a very limited list
of supported laptops (say 3 models) which we could load our corporate
Windows system onto without destroying their recovery partition.  This
might work as we could use (say) Ghost to place any one of the three
tailor made images on their machine.  Windows as we know rarely has the
correct chipset drivers included in the OS and these would be manually
pre-installed in each of the 3 images.  This plan is flawed too because
models and chipset combinations change very quickly - even in the same
model.

Another thought is that we could install a very tiny Linux OS (maybe
DSL) which could include (say) VirtualBox with our corporate image
already rolled up inside.  The idea is that the machine would then boot
Linux and roll straight into VBox and then Windows without intervention
from the user.  I favour this idea as we would not have to be so
worried about what employees buy.  Deletion of the corporate
install would be much easier too when or if an employee moved on.

I have once in the past set up a server which ran CentOS which contained
VBox which started a Windows server instance in the background.  This
worked very well.  This time I want the smallest instance of Linux to
boot to a visible instance of the corporate Windows 7.

Has anyone been down this track?  I would welcome any thoughts.

Licensing is not an issue as we are diligent about purchasing licences
for each machine and let's forget about any other privacy issues that
people might believe we will run into.  I am looking for a purely
technical solution to our coming problem.

Regards,

Rick