Thin clients, labs, and applications

Question

We have thin clients in some labs and have a specific virtual desktop load specific for that lab.  The issue;  students do NOT have to log into the network and we want to change this.
Our issue:
We have 10 licenses for an application in a lab.  The virtual desktop has this application for 10 computers within the specific lab.
If we have students log onto the network, they will have to option of selecting which virtual desktop to open (multiple courses taken by the student, multiple labs = multiple virtual desktops)
If a student logs in from the library, they will see all the virtual desktops as well and could use one of the 10 mentioned above, thus using up one of the virtual desktop application licenses.
This leaves one student in the lab not able to connect.
Question:
Is there a way to either limit what the student can select based on location/IP address or is there another way to make sure that virtual desktop is only used within that lab?
I have been told that virtual desktops are user based and therefore cannot be altered in this way...so, checking here.
TIA,
--cdburns

Answer 1

We have a similar requirement, as we are replacing physical labs with VDI zero and thin clients and want them to behave similarly.  Our physical lab environment had different software setups for different locations (Geology, Audiology, Nursing, etc.).  We have locked down access to the VDI environment (the broker) from on-campus only, and the majority of our zero and thin clients are setup to auto-login to a specific pool - getting rid of the areas where students can select which pool to log into.
There is one exception where we had to be more harsh because of compliance reasons.  We could only let students log into a specific lab pool if they were using specific thin/zero clients.  You've already mentioned our solution to this as we used VLANs to restrict this access.  The VMs in the pool resides in a VLAN that only allows the PCoIP protocol access from another VLAN where the authorized zero/thin clients reside.  While authorized students would be able to see the pool selection if presented on their own or unrestricted device - they wouldn't be able to fully take control as the PCoIP connection wouldn't work.
Another option is to use the broker labels.  We abandoned this option as it didn't seem to be scalable and we'd have to potentially setup multiple broker servers in order to accomplish this.
I'm waiting for vmware to come out with a better solution.  You'd expect there to be a desire to restrict access to various pools based on the client endpoint or location.