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Thin Clients in a Computer Lab Environment?
chachi8 asks: "I work as a lab administrator in a university, and I currently look after about 500 Windows-based PCs spread out over 20 locations. The IT administration at my school has recently (and quite suddenly) decided that thin clients are a direction we should be pursuing, and I've been doing some research over the past few weeks. We've recently been visited by representatives of Citrix who basically showed us some really impressive software that is far from cheap. Because we're a university facing budget cuts, cost is a major issue for us, so what I'm interested in knowing is whether anyone has implemented a thin-client solution in a computer lab environment, and whether it turned out to be cost effective over a 3-5 year timeframe. Clearly, the idea of being able to add an extra few years to the lives of our lab PCs is very attractive, as is the thought of being able to centrally administer the software in all of our labs, but I'm as yet unclear as to whether the costs of servers and licensing (and everything else) will really result in a long-term savings in money."
www.k12linux.org
Absolutely phenomenal. We installed it today and will be deploying it in a lab environment soon.
Not a SINGLE problem in install or setup.
- Nothing is true, everything is permitted
I know a few years back at an Australian university we looked at thin clients for our computer labs. FWIW, the cost (Back then) of thin clients was about the clost of a Celeron computer, and did not come with a monitor either. The server (IIRC) had to have a whole bunch of memory (some 64mb per client, plus a very large overhead for windows + citrix), then they added Windows access licenses for NT on to each terminal that needed to access the server, plus NT client access licenses ... in the end it was just WAY more expensive than individual computers, even including total cost of ownership. However, I will re-iterate, this was some three years ago though... the scene has probably changed...
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
My university has experimented with thin clients, and has chosen to continue to use full PCs for the labs. The client boxes were nice, but they did not work as well and tended to be harder for them to keep running. Now the only thin clients they use are some Compaqs that they've placed around the school as email terminals. --These are actually very popular among students, as they don't have to fight for lab space just to check their email.
As a database administrator / designer working with imaging databases in a WinFrame Citrix enviroment, you might want to make absolutely sure all of your software will run before you buy. Some of our compilers and custom tools absolutely will not load or execute properly on the Citrix server, yet work perfectly fine on every other NT platform on the planet.
Weeeeeee. Oh yeah, and some apps simply will not run. WordPerfect2000 and some others come to mind.
Cheers,
LV
Woot w00t w007.
Having a central Windows machine and thin clients for each of the users was a horrendous mistake. Whole labs spent as much time non-functional as they spent functional. Even having users change their passwords was problematic. Now, this was a few years back now and things may have improved. However, the only way I'd consider this is if the company you are buying the hardware from will guarantee uptime. This should be at least 99.9% uptime (and yes, this includes security patches and hardware failures), otherwise you are going to get crucified.
On the other hand, the computing science department also maintains several labs running OpenBSD for the client operating system. A student can log in to any computer in any lab because the /home directories are exported (over NFS, I think, but I could be wrong) from central file servers. The default software is installed locally so things can run very quickly but a large amount of additional software is also installed on central file servers and exported out to all the machines.
That setup is not bulletproof but the uptime is measured in weeks or months rather than hours or days. Depending on the year, it probably approaches 99.9% uptime. It also has the nice advantage of almost all of the software being entirely free.
So which should you go with? From my experience (ymmv), the clearly superior technical solution is to run OpenBSD on a large number of semi-thin client Intel machines. This is far more reliable than a competing Windows solution. From a cost perspective, there's really no comparison. That said, this assumes that you can migrate over to a Unix style environment. Not everyone can. Do not forget that you'd be throwing out all your Windows software using this solution. Also, you require sysadmins who are familiar with Unix. I assume this is the case.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Products like citrix are targeted to the business environment or low bandwidth use such as spreadsheets, wordprocessing, etc. (Where your screen updates are minimal) If you are going to do graphics, Citrix is not for you. Sound is okay, though Terminal Services (RDP 5) seems to have better sound. So what do you use those lab machines for? Simple office like apps, or programming, or graphics. That will dictate if Citrix, or anyother product liek it, is worth the money.
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
I've seen their technology in use, and it is quite impressive. It is also very expensive though as you mention.
What I'd suggest is either since you are already using Windows get a Windows Terminal Server and use RDP. Just this week I used a RDP client for Linux, and it worked flawlessly (www.rdpdesktop.org), so client OS won't really matter all that much with a Terminal Server.
Alternately, you could get a nice Linux/UNIX server and run remote X sessions.
Either solution requires a competent Administrator, and a beefy server, but both are probably cheaper than Citrix's Metaframe (or whatever it was called) software.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Recently I deployed a thin client solution using Tarantella from www.tarantella.com.
It works great using a webbrowser or the native client.
By using RSA securid I have been able to securely deploy both windows and unix applications to users on the internet. There are native clients available for windows, linux and Solaris
The big advantage is that you only need a windows terminal server for your windows applications. By moving as many applications as possible to Linux you can save a lot of money.
Regards Kenneth
Figure out your annual costs to support the network as is for 3 to 5 years. Software + labor + security (virus software) + hardware. Root out ALL the costs, don't ignore anything ("Oh, we only pay work/study students $8 an hour, it's not important") and any impact down time may have. Call up some locations which have already implemented the solutions you are looking at, approx. the same size and also academic institutions, and see what their costs are (it's not like you are in direct competition).
Get a spreadsheet of the current cost of doing business vs. the solutions you are looking at so you can show it to mgt.
I think, however, that getting away from a PC/Windows based system is the correct solution. Gartner Group once published a study stating that the cost of supporting a PC based network was up to $10k/yr in some situations. Sure the software *looks* expensive up front, but over 3-5 years moving to thin clents would probably be a great idea.
But run the numbers first, get competing companies and their products in the door and let them make their best presentation. Make sure they know you are looking at 3 to 5 year costs, not just initial purchases, because PC/Windows always *looks* cheap when you do not factor in the add-ons and support.
Then decide.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
If you are on a budget of less then a couple million dollars then you can forget about citrix, unless meta frame has made some serious improvements in the past 6 months, let me tell you why.
first of all the recomended amount of memory per user is something like 16- 32 MB of ram per user ON THE SERVER, that means that if you want to support 500 users and if you only used to 16mb of memory per user then just to support the users you would need 8 GIGs of ram not to mention the 128 to GIG or ram for just running the OS, not to mention the price of the server that supports that much ram and the price of having between 4 and 8 Zeon procs and then the arrays you would need to store all of the information on that system, something like VNC or some other solution would be more evective, its hard to say what though, thats just my 2 cents
Jon
THat's why you put etherboot on the floppy and have it get everything else from the network.
ltsp.sourceforge.net
I work at a General Electric facility where we recently changed MMS systems to a citrix-driven system, and let me tell you that it is SLOW. A big honking Sun machine powers the Oracle backend, but the user interface runs on Win2k advanced server. On a p2-3xx with 64mb ram and win95, the interface is visibly slow. Another problem we have had is with printing -- the server is supposed to map your printers, but we find that PCs with more than one available printer either won't print, or print to random destinations.
My understanding is that the "thin client" is supposed to save in hardware costs, which it MIGHT. The software costs, however, can't be that much lower unless you use the Linux citrix client. You still have to pay your Microsoft tax for the OS, and then you need NT CALs, and licenses for Office (which I assume will be the major app used). I just don't see the benefit. Citrix is selling buzzwords and hype with terrible performance.
Universities have enough problems with bandwidth, imagine having to share all your applications over that pipe with all the mp3s and video traffic!
If you are serious about thin (e.g "diskless") clients, take a look at bpbatch. It an interesting diskless boot loader.
http://www.bpbatch.org/
BpBatch is a versatile remote-boot processor, that can be downloaded for free from the Web. It can perform a large variety of actions on a computer at boot-time, before any operating system operation has started. Actions performed by BpBatch ranges from partitioning hard disk to authenticating users, including a graphical interface. The main feature of BpBatch is the partition cloning facility, which let you create an image of a computer's hard disk partition and then distribute and install this image on a cluster of PC.
The trick is to balance cost of hardware/software of server/client with the flexibility of upgrading hardware/software on the server end, yet keep performance high, and security in mind.
So, If i was doing this, this is how i would approach it:
1. you have to keep the cost of the thin clients under $250... thats without monitor. These need to be small, dependable, and easlily replaced. In other words, you should be able to walk into someones office, and unplug it, and plug in a new one, and they should be ready to go in under a min. if you have to do lots of configuration on the client side to get things working, then get a better thin client from another vendor. Make sure the thin client comes with something like a san disk or something you can overwrite. What you want to be able to do is run a *nix on it that can do remote X connections, or do rdp connections. forget about getting in bed with citrix, its way too much money, and you really dont get that much back. unless you use all the whiz bang features, and have lots of time to learn how to tie it all together.
2. Use a combination of windows terminal servers and *nix terminal servers. By default you want people to use the *nix servers, but their will be some folks who want or need to use windows apps, and letting them be able to do so, is a good thing. You can use rdesktop to let the thin client connect to the windows terminal server. it is a little slower than the native windows rdp client, or the citrix ica client, however its free, and it runs on *nixes. If you had to use the windows rdp client it would cost you a windows ce license at least, and to get the citrix client you would have to spring for the whole citrix package which gets expensive.
3. Get solid dual proc servers with as much ram as they can hold! dont skimp! get fast scsi drives, and try to squeeze it into a small footprint. If you can use the same hardware for both the *nix and windows terminal servers, that will be a plus, since you can shuffle them around incase of failure, or more demand for one kind than another.
4. cookie cut the systems. in other words, have it designed that you can get another server up and configured in under an hour. this way, incase you need to scale quickly, or have massive hardware failure, you have a system that can be brought back online asap.
5. stress test the hell out of your design before you go into production. nothing will be worse than realising down the road that you have a design flaw, and you have to scrap and rebuild stuff. that will piss the users off, your boss off, and probably get you fired. tune for performance, and plan to scale. it doesnt matter if you only have 500 users right now, if your design isnt good enough to scale up to 5000, or even 50000, go back to the drawing board and see where your bottleneck is. Why? cause that bottleneck may come back to bite you one day.
Citrix is expensive, you need Citrix server licences, Citrix Connection Licences, Win2k server licences, Win2k CALs and Win2k Terminal Services CALs. Not cheap, I firgure I've spent about $600 CD per user on these alone. In the end this will save you money on admin time and headaches. The upfront costs are scary but the TCO is lower.
Thin clients are cool. I use NCD ThinStars and I'm pretty happy with them. They run WinCE, have all the client software built in for Citrix and MS RDP, they remind me so much of the HP X term I used way back when I can't belive it sometimes. Keep in mind you won't have any removable media though.
The thing you have to do before even considering this is audit your software requirements. If you want to setup general use labs with Office and IE, you'll be fine. For a CS lab or an Eng lab where you have stuff like compilers and Matlab installed it just isn't gonna work.
Don't go cheap on the servers, when they go down you are hooped. Of the current bunch out there I like the Compaqs the best, figure on dual proc P3s (Xeons are overkill for this) with 1 to 2 GB RAM and RAID 1 or 5. The boost you get from having a RAID adapter with a big cache is huge when compared to a SCSI system. This server will handle out 25 or 30 people depending on thier usage.
If your software requirements are compatable with the concept I think you should really take a look at it. TCO is much lower, if Office breaks you have to fix it on a few servers, IE uber patches installed a few times, much easier than 100 desktops, belive me. I have two friends that started out with me in the same company 8 years ago and now we are all Citrix admins in different places. All of us have the same opinion, if you have to run a Windows network, this is the way to do it. One of them is the admin for a Citrix reference client.
The only warning I have for you is to be damn careful about the software you deploy. When you have a shared sytem anything can drop the whole boat for you. Be damn careful of HP printer drivers some of the LaserJet drivers will crash you, all of the Deskjet drivers will cause you problems.
Check out these sites for info:
www.thethin.net
www.thinplanet.com
And read these books:
Windows NT/2000 Thin Client Solutions
Citrix: MetaFrame for Windows Terminal Services: The Official Guide
If you have any other questions feel free to email me : electric-monk(at)cadvision.com
The parent is a little shy on details and there is one more post farther down which is better, but I'll add my opinions.
Assess your needs first. What kind of computer lab? What will the students be doing there? Is connectivity with MS apps/OS a requirement? What type of budget do you have for the changeover? What are your current and forecasted staffings for this lab?
There are many "LTSP" posts, and I think that's great, because I administer 45 machines set up this way at my language lab in a Thai university, but it may or may not be for you. We require some Windows programs that were pruchased before I came on, so we use a Win2000 terminal server and the rdesktop program.
It all works beautifully, but do NOT be confused by some of the posts below, because sound IS NOT supported on terminal server. The word from MS is maybe next generation (really makes you wish it was open source and you could just add it in, no?).
I researched this for about four months, and, in the end, we went with K12LTSP, which is preconfigured for LTSP using auto DHCP on RH 7.2 with all sorts of difficult to set up issues already resolved (including sound). It includes a lot of extra software like openoffice, and you can just pop in a RH7.2 disk to get the development stuff you will probably need. It is an awesome piece of work, and I heartily recommend it.
As I said, start with evaluating your needs before locking yourself into a solution that may cause you more headaches than individual machines.
Dan
Put identity in the browser.
Howdy,
I admin for a company that does management for Medical Offices. We have several offices that run windows 2000 server with Terminal Services loaded. I have been very very happy with these sites.
We also have several sites that are running in a pure Windows 2000 network environment. (All Win2K CLient workstations, and servers.. nothing else) Either option is pretty close to the same cost. We use ternimal services in offices that have a lot of semi-decent hardware onsite or are planning on purchasing new computers. If a site has a bunch of skanky hardware sitting around then Terminal Server is the way to go.
Rememeber to audit your software before you consider this. EVERY SINGLE APPLICATION you want to use has to work under Terminal Services to get this to work. I built a server and test drove all my apps before I bid out the server. Lots and lots or RAM is a MUST to do Terminal Services, and I have two processors and RAID 5 in all my servers (Compaq Proliants).
The other great thing about Terminal Services is remote Administration. You get a free terminal access license with every Windows2000 server license for administrative purposes. I have a WAN link to all my servers and I can do 90% of my admin tasks from my office.... no more onsite.
I doubt a thin client option will be any cheaper unless you have a ton of skanky boxen with about 128MB of RAM and decent video cards, but TCO is borderline.
Stay away from Citrix unless you need its expanded capabilites (X-tra clients, some better mapping (serial ports and such), and some better file system stuff). Citrix is a buggy add-on that can be very expensive very quickly. For MS Office, Internet Explorer, Outlook and most basic Apps, Windows Terminal Services is probably adequate. Watch for License issues, we use an SCO terminal access client for accessing our SCO based Practice Management System that is a bit funky in the way it is licensed on a Terminal Server.
Good luck and if you want to see my whitepaper and TCO comparisons (3 2000 Sites) (3 Terminal Server Sites) with 18 months of installed base time, drop me an e-mail!
Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
I helped set up and run a lab of 20 sunrays for the math department at the university I went to. They replaced 20 Ultra 1's. Administration became much easier.
They aren't incredibly cheap compared to what you could build low-end PCs for these days. But not having to maintain many individual wintel machines might make up for the price.
Another thing to watch is that the sunrays need their own 100Mb switched network. (AKA the Sunray Interconnect Fabric. Thank you marketing.) If you have Sunray Enterprise Appliances (again, thanks) in many different buildings, this may be a problem, as they would need their own switch in each building. And each switch needs it's own connection to the server. This could be a problem if you don't have dark fiber/copper in the ground. I seem to remember that you can't use vlans for this. Check the info on sun.com.
One very good thing about this solution is the 5-year warranty. If an appliance dies, you call sun, get the new one in 2-3 days, swap it with the old one and you're going again. no fixing PCs.
They do sound, you can surf the web, read e-mail, and use StarOffice for your office apps which is all most students might need.
my $0.02
-BigT
Is it weird in here, or is it just me?
That is incorrect. Each machine that ever connects to the server requires a Windows Server CAL, $40. It also requires a Terminal Services CAL, $135. So each seat costs $175. Each concurrent connection to the server requires a Citrix connect license, about $300-$400 depending on what flavour of Citrix.
So fully replacing a PC costs around $500, plus the cost of the terminal, plus the cost of the server. Now, standard educational discount can run up to 90%--of course, you can frequently get educational discount on the hardware as well. Don't forget that applications running on the server are also licensed per-seat. Can't just install one copy of Office and run the whole place.
Citrix is also a bit of PITA to administrate. It's doing a difficult thing, and doing it pretty well, but there are minor sniglets, especially if you're using the more advanced functionality. Short answer? Better have a good reason to use Citrix. If you have one, it'll work out; installing Citrix blind, however, leads to massive problems. We use it where I work as part of our suite of services, and it fills the niche we use it for very well. But I'm not about to ditch all the computers in the office for WinTerms.
Also never hurts to remember: The network is the load average.
I work for a company that uses Citrix Metaframe and Windows 2000 terminal server, as well as a mix of PCs and thin clients.
.GIF and .JPG files suddenly becoming associated with a shareware package (like LView Pro), which isn't even installed on our Citrix servers. Then, nobody can view the images by double-clicking on them in Windows Explorer until we change it back again.
So far, I've come to a few conclusions.
1. Be *very* cautious about deciding to serve an entire Windows desktop to the clients. There are unbelievable security/configuration headaches you'll encounter as time goes on. (Basically, what happens is a user can install a program while using the Citrix desktop. Even if he/she doesn't have the administrator rights that are required to succeed in installing the application to the Citrix server, it can still end up writing some changes to the system registry before it fails.) We've seen things like
2. Internet Explorer (or any web browser, for that matter) runs very poorly when served through a Citrix ICA session. It will work pretty well viewing a static HTML page, but things like Shockwave and Flash video will clobber the Citrix server's CPU and update very sluggishly on the client's system that's viewing it. Unfortunately, if you try getting around this by letting users run a locally installed browser instead, you can't easily handle things like their own personal sets of bookmarks/shortcuts, or cookies.
3. As others have already pointed out here, printing from inside Citrix is troublesome. We've had issues with print notifications going to the wrong user (never did get a decent explanation from Citrix on why this happens out the blue, every so often). More importantly, some printer drivers just refuse to work properly in a Citrix environment.
4. Avoid thin clients that come with "embedded NT" (NTE)! That's all we're using right now for thin clients (Netier XL1000 and XL2000's), and they're bad news. They take a LONG time to boot up, and they're too much like using a full-blown PC, minus the hard drive and cooling fans. Since they do still need the special "embedded" version of the OS, you have to pay the manufacturer's inflated prices to make you new OS images when you want to upgrade them. (They told me just to switch to embedded Linux on our Netiers, it would probably cost in the ballpark of $2000-2500 to have Wyse engineering work up a custom master image for us.) Then too, the "management software" they provide for most thins is less than stellar. At best, you get the exact same functionality you'd get using something like the latest verison of Symantec Ghost on your PCs (with the new Ghost Console). More often, you get a buggy system manager that requires learning yet another proprietary scripting language to push software updates to your thin clients.
Actually the issue with windows terminal server (if you mean that) is that its not diskless - you need an os to run it - i dont know if there are linux clients for it or not so that may not be a problem.
The great thing about citrix is the range of clients available - i have as a test done an install on a 486SX16 notebook and dialed in - dos client only for dial in (configuration was a breeze) and then it runs a full Citrix Desktop - i have seen it done with 485 machines and i know of at least one company using P166 machines with slakware running a linux client for Full windows desktop - its a great cheap solution to dedicated thin terminals.
The thing about many other terminal server solutions is they need an os to run on top of - windows or otherwise - with citrix you can use terminals or i believe there is even a bootable floppy client for it so no internal harddrives are needed on older machinery.
Im told it will run on XT's but have never seen it done. This is one product that is worth the money.
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