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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."
However, make sure that it's a site similar to the one you are on; no point getting a business as a reference site for a uni.
Finally, if things don't go as planned post-implementation, point out to Citrix that you are educating the future decision makers of the world; if they perceive that Citrix is crap, they won't buy it in years to come. That should get them to help fix your problems!
I got to Cal(UC berkeley) and we have a couple labs full of SunRays, which I have found great from a user perspective. Now, the thing you're not going to beleive is why. The sunrays are silent. You never notice how loud the fans from forty computers in a lab are untill you walk into one that's quiet. It's much easier to think for long periods of time. The labs are about 50/50 divided between unix pc's and sunrays, and I'll only work on the PC's if I have to, though the (computer desktop) environment is identical.
There are some disadvantages with sharing a Big Computer with a lot of people, but overall the plusses seem to outweigh the minuses. Last year about halfway through the semester the workload increased on the servers and everything slowed down... This was the bad part. The good part was that a month later, they added another server, switched a number of the clients over to it, and everything jumped back up to speed. If these had been PC's that weren't cutting it any more they would have had to be replaced.
I have no idea what they've gone through on the administrative level, or if Sun gives us a good deal or not. They deployed a new lab last year, so they must not hate them...