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Would You Move to Windows Thin Clients?
"Most users will be running basic MS Office apps, Groupwise for e-mail, and accessing some Oracle databases. A consultant hired for preliminary recommendations is saying that we should run Windows XP on the thin client boxes, not even the embedded version but the full one. Additionally, some of our users have more powerful applications like AutoCAD and ArcMap. We have already determined that those users will not be moving to the thin client machines.
Our department has spoken with a Citrix support/sales person who claims you can support up to 1000 clients on a single Citrix server. That seems so far from what I have generally read that I have a hard time buying it. Can anyone corroborate that claim? Again, most users will be using Office, Groupwise, and accessing Oracle DBs.
Does anyone have any experience with a workplace making this sort of migration? I would love to find a way to make it work, but from the research I have done so far, it doesn't look like we are going to get any cost-savings (unless they miraculously decide to go with Linux)."
The savings would be better with Linux, but they may very well be worthwhile anyway. Determine how much IT time you're going to save against the cost of the setup.
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
Maybe you could run CrossOver Office on Linux used remotely on Linux thin clients... and then run a web-based version of Groupwise on an NT box (if required).
From my experience, in your kind of environment the only way you're ever going to get thin clients to save money is if you start pirating software (Or use free software, but you say that isn't an option). Stick with what you already have (early pentiums/late 486s running win95 OSR2 are more flexible than you might think, especially for the kind of jobs you require them to do) and only buy new hardware for the power users. Yes, linux/*BSD would be an ideal option, but if you have to run Windows and be reasonably cost effective, thin clients aren't really an option.
I am very, very suprised that thin clients are going to increase the number of administrators that you'll need.
It is possible that thin clients are going to require hiring. Possibly, all of the current support staff is probably going to be fired, and people with thin client support experience are going to be hired.
Maybe it's time to update your resume.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I must be really stupid. How on earth is linux going to save you money?
Your users are still going to be using Microsoft Office, Groupwise, and the custom-written applications to access the Oracle DB, right? Isn't most of your cost supporting these applications? Isn't supporting these applications on Linux going to be just as difficult?
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Okay, no I'm not.
... or at least, don't change it much. Maybe re-think your use of networking and other such things, but still within the framework of your existing OS setup.
Why change?
What do you need to 'fix' in the existing system?
Continue to use per-desk PC's, albeit cheaper/better/easier to administer, and continue to utilize 'upgrade' licensing schemes - the cheapest you can possibly get from Microsoft, is, probably, very cheap - to maintain the OS upgrade/fix end of things, and you can probably do this all very cheap.
"Thin-client" is just another word for extremely small/light/cheap PC-in-a-box. So maybe the simpler option to 'considering remote client solutions' is simply, put it all into better hardware (new CPU/more RAM/*standard* video for all systems/etc.) and don't change your existing software standards
If you maintain your existing stance with regard to how well your business problems are solved by your software systems, and give it a 'boost' with periodical hardware upgrades for key areas/servers every now and then, there is little reason to drastically change everything at all.
When the PC is akin to the size/heft of a block of printer paper, 'administration' becomes relatively trivial - particularly in an organization of 2,000 people or so... if you've got your software worked out.
Just get smaller, lighter, cheaper PC's, and refresh them every now and then. Convert as much as possible to cheap laptops and monitors, even.
They are out there.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I deploy and support this type of environment for a living (until I can earn my living with Open Source). While the number of users per server depends largely on what applications that you are running, a good (conservative) average number is about 50 users per dual-processor server. I tend to deploy dual-processor machines as their are diminishing returns on quad-processor servers (For example going from dual- to quad- processor increases your user count per server from 50 to only about 75 or so). These rules of thumb are on your average Pentium III server with about 1.5 to 2 GB of RAM. The Office software and Groupwise will conform well to this rule of thumb. Not sure on the Oracle apps, but if they are well-behaved 32 bit applications (read no DOS, 16Bit) they will run fine. Obviously you will want to pilot this environment to bench mark your specific results. Servers with Pentium IV Xeons will probably scale much better.
You will definitely want Citrix here for the advanced management and capabilities over Terminal Services alone (application publishing, advanced load balancing, managment console, etc).
If you take the benchmark numbers I mentioned earlier and add 20% or so for redundancy, you are looking at a farm of about 24 servers vice 100. Using the management capabilities of Citrix and server cloning techniques, administration of this farm will be be pretty easy. A single, experienced Citrix administrator can handle most of the level 2 and 3 support for this farm. With server cloning, adding additional identical servers for growth/redundancy down the road is easy.
You have correctly identified users of AutoCad and ArcMap as poor candidates for this type of environment due to the heavy requirements and graphics of these applications.
I disagree with the consultant that full blown XP is the best solution for the client. He/she may be hedging their bet for any Windows based applications that would not run well under Terminal Services/Citrix. If this is not the case, there are several Linux-based thin clients that would work well and would have a lower cost.
No.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
I've been looking at this as well but on a smaller scale. First, Citrix doesn't support 10-25 users per server -- it's per processor. So a 4 way processor can conceivably handle 40-100 users and since you don't seem to be running hard core apps like CAD (you mentioned that these users would not be migrating), etc, let's say 20 users per processor or 80 users on a 4 way box.
That puts you at 12 Citrix servers.
Next, according to the Citrix folks I've worked with, Windows Server 2003 handles Citrix MUCH more efficiently than Windows 2000 resulting in -- according to them -- a doubling of the number of users possible on each server. Since I don't quite buy that, let's go with a factor of 1.5 times the users rather than doubling. But let's stick with 12 4-way Citrix server to account for redundancy which you will surely want for this solution. Heck -- let's go with 15 even. It's still a lot fewer than 100.
I agree that -- at the beginning, using old hardware would save money initially. But, consider the support angle for a second. Rather than new, identical thin clients, you'll still have whatever you currently support for desktops. If you just maintain the copy of Windows that's on there, when one breaks, it's a total reload. If you use the new thin clients, it's a matter of swapping out the unit and they're less expensive to buy initially as well as more reliable due to fewer moving parts. You should see support costs drop dramatically with this rollout.
The Citrix guy that mentioned 1000 users on a single box had to be talking about something much larger than 4 processors... personally, I would recommend a cluster of 4 ways servers for teh redundancy that it would provide in the event of a hardware failure.
Going with Linux won't necessarily save in the long run. Sure -- you'll save on the initial software acquisition. But consider the support, end-user retraining and other problems that could crop up. Even if you use Cross Over office or something like that, your users WILL require retraining and you will suffer a productivity issue initally.
Not going with a Linux solution won't automatically doom the project nor will it prevent savings from the implementation.
I'm all for Linux (I have it deployed where it makes sense), but am wary of making generalizations that it automatically saves money.
First, why do you want to do this in the first place? You can get many of the benefits of "Thin Clients" by using a networked filesystem to store applications and configuration data, but still run the applications on the client PC. Also, you'll probably need less servers for this approach, since they'll just be networked disk servers, not application servers.
In my experience, the big benefit of having a Citrix server is being able to run Windows applications from clients that are not x86-based. For example, if the client is running Solaris on SPARC, but needs access to a Windows-only application, then that client can just access it through Citrix. Then any slowness from the network or the (loaded) server is somewhat acceptable, seeing as how you couldn't otherwise run the application. But that doesn't sound like the case at all in your scenario.
Also, you might want to see what VMWare has to offer; they are also in the x86 Server virtualization market.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I don't mean to be a troll, but c'mon -
"From my preliminary research, there is very little savings when moving to a thin client environment that isn't based on Linux."
At least that was preliminary research.
...at $WORK I have a Linux box that handles ~25 full screen X sessions all day long, and hovers around .10 load average. The box is an old dual PIII 500MHz with 2GB RAM, 36GB RAID 0+1 volume. All of the client machines are Windows XP desktops using VNC viewer locally to attach to Xvnc sessions on the Linux box (which is kicked off in xinetd on-demand).
The server itself was considered too slow to run Windows. It had been retired from the Windows domain, and the bean counters have written it off the books. Yet there it is, serving a vital business function to my users that is about to scale up to another ~30 users in the next couple of weeks.
Every bit of software involved in making this happen was free. The hardware was, effectively, free. And I'm already handling more users than the newfangled expensive Windows 2000 Terminal Server that is parked in the same rack.
This move was made to stave off the sudden onslaught of requests for a second machine (linux) at every desk. The corporate standard desktop has been and will be Windows for some time to come. But setting up a Linux box with lots of RAM, fast disk and Xvnc has already saved us over $45,000 that would have otherwise been spent on dedicated Linux machines at every desk.
Then Sun dropped the ball on producing a Java VM capable of supporting desktop applications. Besides, nobody wanted to totally retool for a new platform. So they tried to reinvent the "thin client" as a graphics terminal connected to a Windows application server. The absurdity of calling a simple bitmapped graphics terminal a "client" should have clued people on to what a bad idea this was.
What do the average windows admin do? problems arise, reghost the image from the second partition, apply all new patches and youre set to go.
What do korean Cyber Cafe owners do? Theres some korean software better than PCSecure that allows access to all programs but renders the entire system read-only except the directories where you need to write. And then the admin remotely deletes those directories.
So admining over 70 systems, I can really understand your need to be in full control of all those systems without hiring a team of highschoolers. Its much worse if various clients need different software, many expect full control of their system and noone tolerates a slow boot. UNIX fixes these problems so beautifully.
I did some research years ago on remote-booting Windows98 maybe on gigabit ethernet and powerful servers. Theres a linux howto on how windows can be copied on a freshly made partition after a net boot, then booted. So it all really depends on each situation.
You mentioned XP. To decrease maintenance on hundereds of machines, use something more reliable and tested, like Windows98 or Win2k.
We use terminal services on all the 70 workstations with about 20 working at any time, and it works perfectly. To be fair, I'll tell you the server is an IBM eSeries with 2x PentiumIIIs and 2gigs of ram and 10k cheetah disks. On Pentium1 clients, the apps run much better on TS than native.
For any network based solution make sure your pipes are fat. Get good switches, tune them and do ethereal to test the switch-based traffic, make sure all clients have the good 3com NICS, should be all PCI 100 speed at least, and if you can help it, start with gigabit ethernet.
Oh yeah, since you're asking slashdot for help, if you do succeed in a new solution, you're obliged to submit a howto.
Cheers.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
saving money, microsoft, windows, easier admin.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
IIRC, the server was a low end Dell Poweredge (the ones that come standard with a 7200RPM IDE drive). I think a single PIII in the I've also had 60-70 users on dual processor servers running database apps and custom software. At 75 users, the server would start to drop connections, and we had to put another server in. It really all depends on the apps.
My advice would be to set up a test server. MS has scripts you can use to load test. I'd guess that with a dual processor, 1GB RAM, Ultra160 server you should be able to serve 100+ office users. Up it to a quad Xeon, 2GB RAM and you should approach 200 users/server. It could be higher or lower depending on the applications and usage patterns of your employees, of course. If they all use the same apps (Word, Excel, etc.) then one nice thing is that the EXEs and DLLs only get loaded once, so you'll really save on memory. But if they're all working on 250 page documents, then you'll still have to worry about RAM. I assume, of course, that these will be dedicated terminal servers, since you're talking so many users.
Here (PDF) is a good whitepaper on the subject. It's part MS propaganda, of course, but there's alot of good info in it and the numbers aren't too far off reality. Like I said though, the only real answer is it depends on your usage patterns.
As for increasing IT staff, I don't know how many you have (staff or servers) now, but adding 5-10 terminal servers shouldn't be a very large burden. I'd set up the terminal servers identically, and then you can script or Ghost a new install. Data would be stored on existing file servers, so you don't even need to back up the terminal servers.
Thin clients would be your least hassle option, but as you've no doubt found out...they're expensive. Yesterday's hardware running Windows 2000 or XP Pro should be more than sufficient though. Unfortunately, it doesn't release you from the patch management cycle, but with 1000+ users you should hopefully already have something in place to handle that already.
So, you're question is can you save money doing this? I'd say no, not right now. I'd guess that your current hardware is sufficient to run your current apps (Office, Groupwise, etc.) so you won't save money in that respect. 1000 users demands some sort of patch and application management. You'll still have the patch management issues, and whatever you're using for application management (GPOs, SMS, etc.) is already licensed. No costs savings there. You'll need 5-10 more servers + operating systems to purchase and maintain. You'll need to keep some desktop support staff to deal with the underlying OS on your client machines, as well as your users who won't be running terminal services. So, unless you have an abundance of desktop techs, I don't think you'll save money there either. Your admins will still need to maintain the current servers, plus the additional 5-10. A server outage will take down 100-200 users, though they can be load balanced to running servers on reconnect, but they'll still lose their current state.
On the positive side, desktop issues can be taken care of quicker and with less legwork. Software upgrades are easier and quicker, requiring less staff. Backup is centralized (if it's not already).
On the whole, I'd say unless you regularly upgrade your PC's or software, are due for a HW/SW upgrade, or have a lot of desktop techs you'll be out about the cost of the servers. But, that's just a guess. I only tend to use TS in remote user environments, or in no admin remote offices to avoid most travel issues. I've never been convinced of a benefit to most companies in using it in place of desktop PC's.
as more people need lpatops in the workplace it tends to push the thin client issue around as well since you end up supporting more desktop enivironments for those same users. mostlly we stoppped seriously considering lightweight clients for desktop machines because of the affordaqbility of localized ratehr than centralized computing resources. we were mostly and x-term based group before migrating away from that to desktop machines.
joelja
I've setup 2 networks using WTS/Citrix. The first was back in the days of WinFrame (NT 3.51) at a polytechnic and the second is where I work now.
:-)
We have all 80 staff around the country (currently) connecting to 1 Terminal server for Office 97, Outlook, membership system. We do have a second TS that runs PageMaker and PhotoShop. And a third waiting to be rebuilt to create a wee bit of redundancy
Although our desktops are Win 2k Pro (cut right back and run the ICA and RDP clients) we have only 2 applications - one needs a local modem and the other is DOS based - that run on the local machines (apart from the laptops). We are starting to look at replacing the desktops with true thin clients (we bought the fat clients in case we had to go back to the 'old' way of doing things with the apps locally). The people with Palm devices can synchronise with Outlook/Exchange through the Citrix session. We have found that the people using laptops often prefer to dialup and connect to a terminal server rather than work off the local apps.
It means that all our data is on one server, not spread about the country. Everyone runs the same versions. We can shadow the user sessions. People can connect to exactly the same set of apps and have access to the same files, in the same locations from another office, from home, from the laptop in a motel room.
The benefits of thin client/terminal server whether it be Windows or Unix based is the only (well ok, a bit of exaggeration there) way to go.
You are missing one big factor: support and maintenance costs. Which platform (thin or thick client) is easier to push out updates, configuration changes, etc. When I've looked at the costs, the software was more expensive in a thin client setting. Our organization is too small for the configuration and maintainability to be an issue. The only reason we have a few thin clients is because you can support more of those over the pipe than the crappy VB/MSSQL programs we run on them.
TS for Windows should be easy/cheap to futz with, as I think Win2k server comes with at least a couple of licenses.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Other people have already commented on the number of users per server. Short form: buy decent servers and assume 50:1 for now. Use Citrix, not Windows Terminal Services.
Look at costs and ROI and decide on a minimum acceptable ratio before you start. Is 10:1 worth it? How about 20:1? 50:1? 100:1?
The important thing is that you TEST before you deploy across the company. Find a few people IN DIFFERENT DEPARTMENTS who are willing to help (or be coerced) with your testing. Different departments are important because you want all of the pieces tested. For the salespeople, Powerpoint matters; for the bean counters, Excel. Buy one decent server. Worst case is that you get to replace the oldest machine in the shop a year sooner than planned. Convince Citrix to give you a trial license for a few months. Tell them that there'll be plenty of other purchases if the trial goes well.
Dedicate at least one full-time person to setting up the server. Remember- you're on the clock with the trial license. Get a client set up ASAP. Do what work you can through the client -- it's more testing. Deploy 5-10 clients for a week (few enough that you can visit all of them in-person in a short amount of time if there are problems) while you iron out replication and performance issues. If all's good, add another 10 each week in a controlled test roll-out until things bog down. If things are looking good, pull in any documentation or training people NOW, before the test users get too comfortable with the system.
Once things have bogged down, look at your target number. If you beat it, great! Run with it. If you didn't, how close were you? If you need 100:1 and you bogged down at 20:1, it's time to give up. If you bogged down at 90:1, maybe it's worth looking at tweaks to the server or network. Remember that at this point, Citrix is hoping to make a pile of money from you, so they may be willing to lend engineering help to your cause.
Reading and research is good, but not sufficient. Your environment is like nobody else's except perhaps your closest competitor -- and they're not going to help you out. You need to test YOUR setup and YOUR users.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
I have four servers configured with a single PIII 1.4GHz CPU and 2GB of SDRAM in a Citrix farm supporting 1100 Mac and Unix users for MS Office apps, Lotus Notes and MS Internet Explorer. *My* Citrix sales engineer claimed that only 15 to 25 concurrent users can be supported per CPU, but I have found that 4x that is easily doable.
:)
Individual users have different ways of working --not everybody is going to slam the farm in the same way at the same time every time they need to use a published app. Even with all one hundred of my client access licenses checked out, CPU utilization and paging on individual boxes in the farm stayed well below my alarm thresholds.
Generic productivity apps for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and email just don't demand much from a CPU. Given the apps you intend to support (Groupwise, MS Office, and some Oracle front ends) I can't see you needing even 10 Citrix servers. Your best bet is put up a test farm and then perfmon your CPU utilization and swapping. Baseline it and then start adding users. Citrix have a very liberal demo program and you should take advantage of it.
As far as corroborating the claim of 1000 clients on a single Citrix server, I supported over twice that many (2270 to be exact) UNIX users with a single Citrix server, a PII running at 233MHz with 768MB of RAM. I started with 15 concurrent access licenses and 512MB of RAM. I added 15 more access licenses and another stick of SDRAM after the early users started spreading the word to the rest of the users how useful it was to be able to take care of company documentation right on your HPUX box and not have to wait for one of the five bull-pen NT workstations to open up. I published the MS Office 97 suite, plus Lotus cc:Mail and Visio, and the server never bottlenecked at the CPU or in paging. I also got to surplus those 5 bull-pen boxes and save the company the annual support fee we were paying to our out-sourcer, half of which, btw, showed up in my xmas bonus that year.
If you are going to publish apps with low CPU utilization like Word and Excel, I think you can easily support your thousand users with a handful of Citrix boxes.
Citrix is expensive, and Terminal Services on Win2K and Win2K3 is very, very good.
Do you NEED Citrix? or are there other applications out there that does what Citrix does at a lower cost? Look at Newmoon Systems they have some excellent solutions that are very cost effective and superior to Citrix in environments.
Call you IBM Direct representative. They have some excellent whitepapers regarding server virtulization and Citrix (from a company called Conseco Finance I believe)
Do your research and talk to LOTS of people. Maybe even hire a professional consultant to help you with this project.
My office uses a combiantion of Thin and Fat Clients in carefully monitored and locked down environments to provide applications to 30 medical offices in 18 states. Thin clients don't do everything and Fat Clients are not always better, but Citrix is an expensive licensing beast.
Good Luck. Write a How-To when you are done!
Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
Other comments have suggested 10-20 servers is a more realistic number of servers, but server hardware tends to be a _lot_ more costly than desktop hardware, so 20 servers at $5k each = $100k, vs. 100 desktops at $1k each. Plus you have to license citrix, windows for every client, buy at least a few new computers, or get some kind of 'winterm' (about the same cost as a low-end PC -- $500-700 with monitor). Don't forget the implementation, training admins, hiring or contracting skilled WTS/Citrix admins, upgrading network infrastructure, etc.
Based on the above, lets call initial costs a wash, or perhaps thin client costs twice as much compared to normal PCs.
Now it comes down to whether you believe the gartner TCO b*llsh%t. Make some wild-assed assumptions and you can come up with a 'cost model' that will support any position you want to take.
Our experience:
Citrix/WTS works well for remote access and for running apps from non-windows platforms. It's also good for remote offices where the function is well defined and there's a small number of users (e.g.: retail locations).
Problem: Security is essentially non-existant. There is a veneer of what appears to be a 'locked down' environment, but there is always some way to open a help window or somesuch and pop into IE and then *bam* you've got the ability to browse the file system and run just about anything.
Another problem: Because Citrix/WTS allocates memory per user and does not share between users, vast amounts of memory are needed per server. We have an app that uses 180MB per user, so for 10 users we need around 2GB of RAM. This puts a hard upper limit on how many users can use a memory-intensive application.
We also use Linux and X-Windows. Running a java swing app that takes about 80MB per user, around 70MB is shared, so each user takes a delta of 10MB. That same 10 user mix uses around 170-180MB of RAM vs. 800MB+ if it ran on Citrix. Also, since much of the app is shared, CPU cache is much more effectively utilized and performance is much better as well.
Perhaps you could concentrate on migrating apps to X-Windows and running them on Linux servers. This won't work for everything, but it may end up providing a lot more business value.
Good luck. You'll need it.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Always curious--where do you work that has 1100 Macs? I thought i knew most of the major Mac install sites, but that doesn't fit the profiles that I know.
Would be happy to discuss this off-list if you prefer. Email addy is above.
--
$tar -xvf
A few points from an arms-length admin (We have a 600+ user MF farm, I don't admin it [happy] ): /dev/null.
- Printing can be a nightmare. The individual Win print spoolers hang, eating cpu and stalling print jobs for all users on that server. The solution to print jobs going just anywhere was to create an initial default printer eqivalent to
- Roaming user profiles are insane. Add another server to collect them; it _must_ be up or the entire farm is useless. Need to make a global change? Everyone loses all customizations after all profiles are reset to the default. Try to find what svr a user is on? Enjoy browsing the uselist on each machine.
- MS apps are the worst-behaved. Heavy memory footprint, cpu monopolization, cross-user flakiness & registry weirdness. What fun!
- Vendors tout MF compatibility, it will be your problem to make it work (at all).
- Install mode, execute mode and uninterruptible install reboots.
The MF admin now takes a fanatically strict approach about what makes it on the farm. Any slight weirdness, it don't make it on.
"Remember, any tool can be the right tool." -- Red Green
Let me reiterate one point: This is a user's perspective of Citrix from someone with a predominantly UNIX and networking technical background. I do *not* have a clue about the finer points of managing Citrix installations, nor do I wish to after the last few hateful months with it!
The big selling points of thin clients are supposed to be a lower TCO and better security and management. In short, for WinTerms at least, this is pure marketing bullshit. Sure, it's a couple of hundred bucks a seat cheaper for your hardware and your end users can't install a macro virus or whatever. Well, actually, that last point is wrong. It's perfectly possible to have a user trash your Citrix server if the code happens to get executed there because your AV vendor wasn't on the ball or a patch was broken, only now they can effectively take down twenty other users at the same time.
Another thing that they don't tell you is that software licensing is a fricking nightmare - 1,000 users and 500 seats still equates to 1,000 licenses in many cases. We use Microsoft apps a lot, and they are totally inconsistent in their licensing requirements for thin clients, so much so that we now have full time staff just looking into thin client software licensing issues. Some other vendors are better, others are worse. Others are MUCH worse. More $$$ on the TCO.
Let's look at that TCO a little, while we are here. A tier 1 Windows corporate PC (after bulk discount) is roughly 1000 for us, including all of your office apps (cheap because they are bundled). A Wyse term is setting us back around 700, including your hopefully per-seat software licenses (not as cheap because they are unbundled, but on a bulk purchase scheme). *But* for each 10-20 users, you need a server. We run at 15 and still have performance issues, and we are talking dual Xeon boxes with 2GB of ECC RAM here; not cheap. The hardware/software costs are, in fact, about the same per seat, if anything thin clients are more expensive.
So, that leaves the management aspect of TCO. OK, there's less patching to be done, right? Well, actually no, since all the updates on our traditional desktops and laptops are handled either by the AV application directly or via a systems management package. No savings there. Warranties? Nope. That evens out in the same way that the hardware costs do. First line support costs? No, users still have the same problems with Office and what not. Second and third line support costs then? Ah! Finally a difference; you get to cut back on all your school leaver PC techies at near minimum wage and hire some Citrix Consultants instead, sure you only need half as many, but they come at three times the salary.
Citrix itself comes across a horrible hack to anyone who has used UNIX thin clients over X11. Performance sucks if you try and do moving video; even VNC managed to do better. And by moving video, I mean a flash animation like you get in a web page, not DVD quality FMV. The screen update code is nothing short of appalling; quite often a webpage is unreadable because the *entire* screen is updating to display one lousy Flash advert, and I've even seen mouse rollovers on links cause this. Whatever happened to atomic updates? While I'm slating the Citrix code, lets take a look at some of the other issues I've had the misfortune to experience:
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
A consultant hired for preliminary recommendations is saying that we should run Windows XP on the thin client boxes, not even the embedded version but the full one.
Your consultant is an idiot, fire him. Besides that, you have to decide if you're going to seriously persue a thin client strategy or not. If you're doing this for cost savings and don't want to move to Linux on the client side, look into VNC or TightVNC. However, this is a not a real thin client and to be honest I wouldn't do it becuase it's probably going to fail.
If this was my shop and we were serious about saving money, I'd go with Linux or BSD on the existing client side hardware and run an X server based thin client. If your hardware is a fairly standard configuration, you could even go with a diskless setup and remove all admin needs on the client side. The windows application server could be implemented using VNC running on W2K -or- Win4Lin terminal server on Linux -or- Crossover Office Server on Linux. This won't allow your CAD user to migrate however, unless a Linux flavor of their software exists, they're stuck on Win.
Back to your consultant, the key to saving money with thin clients is to reduce costs on the client side. Springing for XP and hardware upgrades on the client is 180 degrees from your stated goals. My guess is he's merely reciting his MCSE crap to ensure he can come back for future billable work.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
read: clearcube or others
Desktops generally get refreshed in 3-4 year cycles. Thin clients will eliminate that.
Also, a light footprint on the client side means less games, spyware, security patches, etc that need to be handled by deskside support.
Maintaining 100 servers is cheaper in terms of manpower than maintaining 15 desktops, and labor costs are probaly the largest component of your firm's overhead.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
We looked at a couple of the options earlier last year and decided to just go with a terminal server and a diskless linux kiosk type setup. No disks, no moving parts at all in the box except the power supply fans (we used low end P2's and got away with big heat sinks).
:)
The kiosk boxes used pxe and nfs mounted root. The systems used autologin to an account that would only load a full screen rdesktop session to our central terminal server. Any of the linux diskless web kiosk type instructions would work, just substitute in rdesktop for mozilla where applicable
You still end up paying for your licensing on the terminal server, but there was no client OS cost and you still got the benefit of hardware that rarely failed since there were few moving parts . . .
I would consider the Win4Lin Terminal Server. You get Linux on the clients without any retraining. Boot your client PCs from a floppy, network drive, or CD and then start a Win4Lin session. Your users won't know or care how it works. You can run 25 sessions on a dual PIII server. You eliminate most of your client headaches and save money. Plus you have the opportunity to sneak an occasional Linux app into the mix using just X or VNC.
Someone said thin clients are cheaper because you don't have to buy new hardware every few years. Bullcrap! Not only has my local government employer replace all the servers in the last 3 years, It is replacing the clients themselves as well. The only thing going on is the el cheapo 17" monitors.
Citrix works where it works, in a stable single app environment (think call center). It is more trouble than it's worth (time,effort,$) in an envionment that requires the barest minimum of flexibility.
We have a citrix desktop that loses user files, has monster security hole (browse the servers files any one) and barely changes year to year because our admins don't know how to work it (we use $$$ consultants).
Stay away unless you are braver than I.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
hehe, I was diggin all your info until you said "reliable and tested" in the same sentence as Win98!
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
Sorry -- I should have been more clear. It is a mix of Unix and Mac users, about 400 Mac users and 700 Unix users. I work for Raytheon.
-Rocket Rancher
Sorry to break it to you, but the Oracle NC was a 486-based PC running the FreeBSD OS and Netscape.
There was nothing 'simple' or 'java' about it.
Considering that the Mac users are using Mail and Office apps on a Windows terminal server, don't expect them to be a major Mac site for long...
Reportedly, it might be against your 'of dubious legality' shrinkwarp Windows license to do so. However, it's doubtful any reasonable court would judge against you as long as you had bought the same number of licenses as thin clients that you were planning to use.
Before any jackass makes a comparison to the GPL, remember that Microsoft's EULA is a license on usage while the GPL is a license on distribution. Huge difference. Read this comment for more information.
It would be rather simple to point out to the court that Windows is an utterly insecure operating system and you are simply taking reasonable and precautionary measures to protect the sensitive data of your clients. You can point to the long list of Windows advisories for backup. Hell even the NSA was planning on using VMWARE as a way of managing the Windows risk.
It would make alot of sense for some company to fund work to finish qemu, bochs or plex86 for just this reason. The reason this probably hasn't happened yet is few PHB's know about the value these projects could potentially play for improving their organisations IT management and reducing their organisations security risks. It's a hell of alot easier to patch a single disk image then it is to patch 1000.
Thin clients belongs to 1980. The ideas are outdated. Users want all the experience they can get. They want
a) Animations at 50fps (flash etc)
b) No CPU limit
Central computer mainframes are a big mess, and they become outdated very fast, and this updating is very expensive. It's just an excuse for admins that do not know how to automate updates for his/her clients.
The performance of thin client solutions such as Citrix sucks big time if people are dedicated users (i.e., more than ocassional PC users). Just scrolling rapidly through large documents in Word can slow the server to a crawl (and strangely this is process rather than network related) so say each power user = at least 4 Citix standard users.
Citrix is slow but it is a good way to deploy Windows amongst the non-power users because it does centralise management control. However, I wouldn't call it a cheap solution because you still have to buy all the Microsoft licenses as well as paying for Citrix.
So for a Microsoft shop, I would recommend just going out and buying cheap but good spec PC and let them run their own XP-Pro. For serving, well you may need a Win 2k3 server somewhere, but file serving is best done with Samba - you don't need to pay for client licenses. However, use a Samba on top of XFS or something that supports ACLs - without ACLs it isn't easy controlling shares in a company.
See my journal, I write things there
In my experiance the big catch with this sort of migration is software compatability. There are a lot of Windows application where only one copy can be run at a time, shared memory conflicts etc. To get round this people are starting to look at a 1:1 client server ratio, using blades or virtual machines. In this way user A cannot effect user B and if the server gets junked it is relatively easy and rapid to re-image. With W2K3 Remote Desktop you don't need a server version of the OS on the server, potential saving licence cost.
Oh and be carefull with printer drivers, our Citrix support staff are forever having issues with non Citrix supported drivers craching the whole server.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered.....my life is my own.
Is thin client really a cost-saving approach to a large user environment?
In my experience, yes. Look at this:
At a customer site we have the following implementation, fully Linux: every location has one or more application servers where people log in with their thin clients. There is a master application server. At every location on application master is promoted to be a local master. Every night the local masters synchronize with the global master, and later the remaining application servers synchronize with their local masters.
This means that you have to install an application server only on the global master, the next day all other servers have that application as well. Zero point of administration when it comes to that. The configuration files are not synch'ed from the global master, but at every location the application servers synchronize their configuration (/etc directory with a few exceptions) with their local masters, which means for example that configuring a new printer just has to be done on the local master, the next day all servers at that location know about that new printer.
Users' home directories are mounted via NFS from another server.
And now for the Windows part in this picture: we use VMWare and their persistent disk images (I think they're called like that; they throw away all changes and remain constant). On these VMWares we run Windows 2000 servers to which people can connect via rdesktop (RDP). We are now able to administrate just the Windows image of the global master (by temporarily switching off the persistance option), and the next day all other Windows images are the same. That's also pretty resistant to viruses and worms: just reboot in case of infection :-)
This saves money, since the only points to administrate are the global master and sometimes the local masters (site specific configuration stuff like printers).
My work has a client that has about 20-25 employees, and about 6 actual PC's total, the rest are all $288 dollar wyse terminals and a large dual processor Dell server. So far there is very little load on the server, and we can problebly expand to over 50 users if we had to.
My potato gun was confiscated by the United Nations. They said I wasn't allowed to have weapons of mash destruction.
I've seen ~300 users on a dual processer box (2 years ago whatever was current). However these were primarly UNIX people who had a unix thin terminals, and only used the windows to check their outlook calander, and once in a while open a word document. All their normal work (including non-calander email, and non-microsoft word processing) was done on a unix machine that only managed ~10 users before lack of CPU slowed it down.
In other words you need to figgure out how much load you will have. If everyone is using 90% of their processor with today's fast machines, then you will loose money. If most people have a windows machine near thier place on the assembly line, but can go hours without doing anything then you can support over 1000 on a single processor machine. Odds are you have some sort of mix that isn't quite as extreem on either end. Try to distribute the load so that heavy users are not all one once machine.
Uh... yea.
Your consultant is a moron. I'd have to side with Citrix on this one. I have built Metaframe servers with 500 concurrent users on a server and had great performance. In such an environment you will want redundancy and load balancing so, purchase the load balancing option and build your farm with an N+1 server count. That means however many servers you need to support your 1000 users(users per server depends on applications and server hardware) plus one extra server.
Do a pilot program to test server loading but, no matter what, make the servers strong. They need a minimum of 2 processors and if you go with 500 users per server you will likely want an 8 way machine. For memory a gig of RAM minimum in each but, plan on 30 megs of RAM per concurrent user as a rule of thumb. If you put 500 users on a box then plan on 15 GB of RAM. The disks don't need to be large but they do need to be FAST. They don't need to be large because you should only store the actual applications on the disk no data what so ever. Think of the Citrix server as a workstation but, since there will be so many users it must be extremely fast. But, regarless of the user count, the applications are installed only once so not much space is needed. I typically provision 4 gigs of disk on the Metframe servers but, of course there are exceptions like large numbers of user profiles in the Documents and Settings Directory. Yes, even if you use roaming profiles a cached copy of the profiles will be copied to Documents And Settings while the user is logged on.
On the client side, do not purchase Windows XP. If you are planning on using thin client hardware, go with the embedded client. But, you don't even have to get new hardware. You can continue to use the old workstations with their existing operating systems as the thin client or better yet you could strip the workstations down and make them either network bootable(best) or install a minimal OS and the Citrix client on them(Linux is great for this).
This all works great with MS Office, GroupWise, Oracle clients, Wordperfect, and many many other win32 applications. But, you need to test EVERY application because some have problems and some simply won't work at all.
For the AutoCAD users, leave them with their own workstations and their own OS thin client is not good for AutoCAD or other such locally CPU intensive applications.
We're curious
Is it possible to PXE boot an rdesktop or mstsc client of some sort to get into a windows terminal server?
A common complaint from faculty is that we just show up one day and install new apps. Providing a term server so they can learn on the new software before deploying might pacify them.
I posted about it a bit up there, but yes. You can PXE boot, NFS mount your root remotely into a streamlined linux setup that's whole purpose is to start x and start a full screen rdesktop session to a central terminal server. Rdesktop occasionally crashes, but this is *ok*! The nifty bit about this type of setup, is the user just waits for rdesktop to start back up and when they reconnect they are right back into the same session, right where they left off.
.or floppy . . . I like the PXE option though since it allows for very few (sometimes zero) moving parts and it is very unlikely to fail.
There isn't any reason you have to go completely diskless with pxe either. You could just as easily use one of the CD based linux systems . . . or thumbdrive . .
but it seems to me that a small army of Mini-ITX boxes (the fanless, DC-DC variety) with 128MB of RAM. PXE booted, connecting to a linux rdesktop/X/VNC server and you have an inexpensive thin client for under $400 with a monitor. Put together a server for a few G's (say... 5k)at 50:1 and you have user systems for $500 a piece complete with software. that is assuming that you're deploying from the ground up using OpenOffice, etc.
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
My organisation is currently moving from client server to thin client (Citrix). We have a fairly similar set up to you; 800 desktops mostly using MS Office & Groupwise with in-house applications accessing an Oracle dB.
One difference is that we are doing it by going to an ASP rather than in-house.
Drivers for the thin client solution were;
* simplified support, we are a national body with 10 regional offices. Each had its own server so any upgrades meant visits to every office. (hence I'm still using Word 6!). Moving to ASP also means a 'saving' of about 10 jobs in our in-house team.
* getting longer life out of our ageing Dell Pentium II Win95 PCs. Intention is to fit a thin client card in each PC. As the PCs wear out they will be replaced with thin client terminals.
* restructuring of costs by moving to an ASP, i.e. monthly fee rather than up front capital & licence costs.
Moving will cost more than doing nothing. but doing nothing wasn't an option. The business want lastest version of MS Office. Upgrading based on a in-house client server solution would be more expensive then thin client (ASP or no ASP). Or at least thats what the accountants & consultants tell us!
So yes moving to thin client can save money. The big problem with it though is performance & usability. Running system via Citrix can be slow and frustrationg whn you are used to the 'instant' response of local applications. I'd suggest running a trial first to see how your users & your network cope.
BTW suggesting installing full Windows XP on every PC is just plain daft.
"I deny nothing, but doubt everything." Lord Byron
Citrix is based on terminal servers - so you obviously studied none at all.
Actually, most Citrix based migrations count around 35-40 users per server, and per 10 servers one extra server. This would total to about 35 servers instead of your 100.
Well, any incompetent administrator needs a lot of time to support their systems, so you need to hire a lot of staff. You could also just hire one competent admin to replace you and you might go very well by. A well administered Citrix server hardly needs any administration.
Citrix runs on almost any device.
In almost all instances it will cut a few from your IT department, increase user satisfactory and in general will create a more satisfied userbase.
1000 users on a single server is nonsense - its also something you do not want in case the server goes down (eg: a hardware failure).
I dont see the cost savings in Linux in this particular case.