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Sun Rays For Linux
Tarantolato writes "According to an eweek story Sun Microsystems will be debuting a Linux port of their Sun Ray Server at Linux World this week. This would allow Sun Ray thin clients to be run off of a SuSE or Red Hat box, where you previously needed a Solaris-SPARC setup to do that."
If you've looked into Sun's Sun Ray Technology it's pretty neat. It offers a lot of features that similar windows technology does not.
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This is VERY interesting, considering there are rumours about Sun thinking about buying Novell (which recently bought SuSe). Time to hit trading accounts! :)
Simpy
The SunRay appliance is a thin client that basically runs an X "client" allowing connection to remote servers. The SunRay server software (currently only available for Sparc, but as the article portends, will be ported to LINUX) provides the SunRay appliances with the information to get going (a list of login servers, for example). The appliance basically connects to a Sun server's X.
The SunRay appliance hardware is pretty small, and individually unimpressive--which makes it kind of impressive. The SunRay appliance boots entirely from flash, so they're quiet and light. The small processors make them generate little heat, as well.
They behave similar to something like PXES or the myriad of other thin client solutions. That software turns your system into a remote workstation for any xdm server. That works on any Intel system (maybe there are ports?_ from floppy, USB, flash, TFTP...
An interesting thing is, if you have a LINUX box running xdm, you can use the SunRay appliance as a remote thin client for that server. You still need a SunRay server to get the appliance to behave on the network first, though.
End the FUD
They also handle audio and video. It's pretty neat (but not necessarily all that useful) to watch a movie on a SunRay, detach, log into another and see and hear the movie still playing.
No, is closer to what Microsoft did with RDP
"What existing Linux applications would support it?"
Um, all of them?
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The most impressive part of the Sunrays is definitely that they don't feel like thin clients. Things zap around like as if you were on a local computer -- in contrast, a terminal server running Windows feels extremely sluggish, even with a powerful server and dedicated thin clients (which is basically what you have with the Sunrays :-) ).
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There is another scarcely mentioned, but equally great feature of the Sunray stations: they have no fans!!
If you think that is no big deal, enter your standard computer lab again and pay attention to all the noise... I have worked in a large institution where the whole building was Sunray-based. A completely silent computing environment. You can actually hear the birds chirping outside. You have no idea what it feels like until you've tried it!!
If you actually look at pricing between the Sun Ray's vs someone like Dell, with required software like Antivirus and Ghost (for a larger networking environment) and add them all together, you'll see that you're wrong. Don't believe me? Price 40 machines at the small to mid level business pricing bracket at Dell, Gateway, Compaq/HP, IBM, etc with Enterprise licenses of Ghost and Antivirus and you'll find that you actually save money by buying the Sun Building blocks.
As for portability - sun also has a laptop version of these things with wireless capability. Oh yea, they have batteries that actually last 6-8 hours compared to your normal laptops...
Just another AC thats shooting their mouth off on something they know nothing about...
The most impressive part of the Sunrays is definitely that they don't feel like thin clients. Things zap around like as if you were on a local computer
You have obviously never been to the Technical University of Denmark, or the CS Department of Copenhagen University.
Those places, especially DTU, almost soil them selves from the sheer joy of deploying hundreds of SunRay thin clients. Problem is, people want their browser, their java apps, their animated gifs and (shudder) their Xitrix Windows sessions.
End result is a very thin client like experience. When I matriculated in 2000, we had a large, bad Sun server (24CPU/24Gig IIRC). This has now been demoted to lowly X-server, and it still runs slow as mollasses.
I think SunRay is a kickass technology, I would love to have one on my desk, quiet, cold, connected to a powerful Linux server in the basement. And I would love to see them in action where there was sufficient power for a good user experience.
I totally understand the Universities that deploy them. A three man team and a bunch of cable plugging monkeys can administrate a four digit seat deployment. But the fact of the matter is that users, in my experience, tend to find other alternatives (the Windows Lab, bring their own laptops.), because the responsiveness is so low.
Well, I'm ranting, and it's pre-coffee, so it's probably coming out a little more bitter than it should. This news about SunRays being able to run off linux is good news in my world, as this will allow administrators to buy very powerful commodity hardware at a fraction of the price of Sun iron.
Well one question - what about folk that want to work from home? Roadwarrior and executive types with a laptop who might work fro home in the evening or at the weekend? Does this work over DSL or is that way to slow? Is there any way for an exec to sync their files to a laptop when leaving the building and resync when getting back in the morning?
I don't get the appeal. I've used 'em, and I like the zero-admin aspect of thin clients. But I've been doing the same with diskless X Terminals for 10 years, and lately, diskless net-booting FreeBSD boxes. Like the SunRay, something like a diskless VIA EPIA is silent and zero-admin: it just works, has access to all the stuff on the boot/NFS server. Any such machine in the house has access to the same stuff, like the SunRay does.
Oh, I don't have a "smartcard" to store my stuff on like the SunRays do. Guess I'll have to use that USB memory stick that someone gave me for free instead.
What's the attraction? On a diskess box, the box itself does much of the work, so the boot/NFS server just has to worry about serving files. The SunRay server, from the PR and people here, can't handle many clients cuz the server is doing ALL the work. Doesn't scale.
So why is Sun's porting SunRay server SW to Linux better than just booting a cheap box from a Linux or *BSD? It's still proprietary, and IMHO the architecture doesn't scale. And you still have to buy non-commodity SunRays.
We're currently evaluating Windows XP Embedded thin clients from Wyse, Neoware and HP. They leave a lot to be desired. Not only do you still have a lot of the vulnerabilities and management hassles of Windows, you also have to deal with the weird, difficult to install, generally PITA management software they require. Plus, they're not cheap - about $600 each, without monitor!
Sun Rays have always been very interesting, but up until this, they have only had a Solaris server. Not bad for general browsing and business apps, but we need something that can run MPEG4 stream players, and Solaris isn't the first place to look for that. Linux has solutions, however. This is something we will look into...
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