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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
The obvious anser is right here. That is assuming of course that linux is a viable answer. If you're talking Windows thin client (I hope you're not, since you did post this to /.) Citrix is your only real option.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
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 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.
Ok, think about this, you can probably keep using the same monitors forever, and replace the PC for something like $500 and run all the apps you'd ever want to run in a computer lab. Now, start adding up the Windows licenses you'll need for each PC, plus the Citrix licensing, plus the monster server(s) you'd need to support 300 Citrix clients...
For ease of administration, use ghost to create disk images for each PC configuration. Something goes wrong? Wipe the PC and restore the image.
The thing is that hardware is getting cheaper by the day, software isn't.
-josh
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 still am in awe of what our CIS department has done at Ohio State. They handle something like 200 thin clients, plus all the remote sessions.
Basically, you sit down at an old, stripped down HP-UX machine or a thin client that allows you to log into one of their servers. NT and Solaris are the typical flavors--I can't remember what the other option was. Plus, if you log into the Solaris box, you can open a Citrix client and use that to be logged into an NT server. This is really nice for writing code in UNIX land, but using MS Office for the documentation.
I would just love it if the EE department could get a clue and do something similar. It really would give us the best of all worlds. Oh, and you can read more about the CIS setup here.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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+
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...
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!
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
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.
Same for us - we run a large environment which has to encompass a lot of remote sites and we have been running citrix metaframe 1.8 and now Xp with NT and 2000 terminal server. We use WYSE thin client boxes and they are good value, invredibly reliable and the newer ones have a customised windows CE configuration - you dont even need to have an ip for the server you can configure for a domain and load balance the farm as we do, the first available server (we run 18 load balanced) picks up the client connection and runs with it - if you get your links up to a decent speed this is an option but if not (in the case of remote sites) i adivse setting them to connect to a specific server and then if thats not availble they will choose another - this cuts down on profile copying between boxes (citrix is heavily profile based - stored on the home server of the user).
Publishing APPS is extremely simple and is easier than Windows Terminal Server - this solution is not the best and citrix offers advantages over it.
The things to be aware of / cons
1. Bandwidth - citrix claim 32kb is used by each full delivered client - dont believe them if your users use large databases or financial sofwtare - aim for an overhead of at least half this again and spec the link accordingly x number of users and add an extra 10% - i run 10 people over a 320k link which can be slow under heavy load - increasing this to 384k seemed to give me better performance and 512k made it very fast.
2. User issues - the clients will piss users of if they have had PC's - they have NO cd roms, no floppy drives and the things you can do on a normal PC (like installing software) cannot be done on metaframe - it's a very secure solution and if you are smart and want to lower support you will lock down the desktop and scrensavers and set the default screen res to 1024x768 - this is what we have found to be best, when a user logs into my farm they get a blank screen with no icons and a limited programs selection in the start menu - all of their applications are delivered in a program neighbourhood window. also lock the size of caches and internet files down to a minimum size - long login times are often related to large internet caches.
Users do like it once they get used to it and from a support view the thing is great full remote control built in means you can see instantly what a user is doing, the admin tools are fantastic and support is a cinch. All drives and printers are simply login script homed (we use Kixstart but are moving to an active directory domain so thats changing) and file perissions and access to application farms are as simple as configuring domain groups.
Once you get it worked out its worth the considerable cost, run a license gateway and you dont need overtly large licenses - a license not in use on one server can be used by another and by using load balancing a fault tolerance can be built in (a session will be terminated is a server goes down but a user can log straight back into another)
I liked it so much that even though im the manager i got my CCA (citrix Certified Administrator) and im working on my CCEA (Citrix Certified Enterprise Administrator) if youre looking for a cert which offers returns on investment the CCEA is it but YOU MUST be a REAL mcse as it needs a pretyy deep knowledge base (Paper MCSE should not bother)
Citrix is used heavily in University environmments (i know of 6 here in australia alone) so check it out at them.
PS a note - The downside to citrix is it needs MEATY server - i buy Quad Xeon's with 2.5gb ram and 80gb raids for them - it needs it.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....