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How Many Desktop PCs Can One Server Replace?
NZheretic asks: "HP has just announced that they have upgraded a four-processor server with Advanced Micro Devices' new dual-core Opteron. The amount of processing power a multi-processor multi-core system can deliver seem like a waste of processing power for most traditional servers, which are more likely to suffer from disk access bottlenecks before lack of processing power becomes a problem. But what if that power could be delivered direct to the desktop users? The HP ProLiant DL585 supports eight 64-bit PCI-X I/O Slots (Six 100MHz, two 133MHz). The ATI FireMV(TM) 2400 supports Quad DVI/VGA displays on PCI Express. Assuming that you leave one PCI-X slot for a multiport USB card, thats up to twenty eight displays with USB keyboards,mice and headsets that could theoretically replace twenty eight networked desktop PCs. Using DVI and USB extenders, not all of the user stations would have to be within the 7.5 meter cable distance imposed by the DVI cable limit. The only OS currently capable of supporting this many displays is Linux. What limits would be imposed by the hardware and PCI-X bottlenecks? Taking into account the added cost of the HP and ATI hardware, could it deliver a great reduction in the total cost of ownership over both traditional PCs and thin client systems? How many desktops is it practical for a high end server to directly replace?"
I'm sorry, but this is one of the dumber products I've seen out there.
The software retails for $99 per workstation, and this gets you only one year...additional years are $29, again per station.
Add to that cost the cost of all those dual-headed video cards, USB cards and hubs, and DVI and USB extenders, and your total cost is not at all inconsequential. And for all this work, you have a maximum of 10 users to a server? Plus, those users are physically tethered to the server, severely restricting your network design.
It seems to me that all this and a lot more could be accomplished with less money and less hassle via some very low-end systems and VNC. In fact, that's how I'm accomplishing it right now.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The power can be direct to users via Linux Terminal Server Project. Use a gigabit network and you can have lots of users. But why would someone buy it if it has too much processing power for their needs?
Pci-Express and PCI-X are not interchangable. PCI-X is really fast PCI, where-as PCI-Express is different altogether (Although a PCIe to PCI/PCI-X bridge is supported).
Depending on how these systems are configured, it may not be possible to use that many monitors.
Take that giant server and put it in a back room under lock and key. The only things that should plug into it are a single power cable and network. Put a single KVM in your rack to access all the servers in it.
Now buy 30 thin clients. Each one gets a KVM and a network card. Good. Now plug in the power on all the thin clients and plug their network cables into a switch. To remove clutter if you want you can use 802.11 and all the thin clients will only need power.
Ta-da! Welcome to intelligence.
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OK. Given that a two processor version of the DL 585 is $16,000US and does not include any storage, we can assume that a fully loaded box processors, memory and some storage, is going to run $28,000 plus and that doesn't include monitors. That's more than $1,000 per user just for hardware. Since the average business PC runs under $1,000 the server solution that you suggest just isn't cost effective.
:(){ :&:;};: at a bash prompt and you're fired.
Now add to that cost, the single point of failure issue. Even if the hardware never fails, all you need is for some malicious or clueless user to run
Why do you need an USB card? The server already comes with 2 USB ports, and an USB bus supports up to 127 devices.
Wow, lots of factual mistakes. PCI-X != PCI Express. PCI is a bus, PCI-X is a faster version of that bus. PCI-Express is next-gen AGP. I don't know of many PCI-X video cards. As for input, seperate devices are marked seprately in the kernel, if you just use /dev/input it conglomerates all the inputs. You still need a decent Xserver/servers to handle all the seperate sessions, though.
And since X is monolithic, you'll need to run seperate X threads per display, or one idiot going to a website with a thousand animated .gifs will stop everyone.
In short: Bad Idea.
How many desktops is it practical for a high end server to directly replace?
None, just like a big truck doesn't replace any passanger cars.
You could, however try something like OpenVPS to replace a couple 'o dosen servers with it...
PCI-X is not PCI-Express, and the two technologies don't even have compatible pinouts or signals. PCI-X is the follow-on to traditional parallel PCI, with speeds of 100 and 133 Mhz and a 64-bit wide data path (compared to previous parallel PCI standards of 32/64-bits at 33/66 Mhz). PCI-Express is PCI re-done serially instead of in parallel, in an attepmt to be fashionable like the new Serial ATA standard. It's also potentially faster than PCI-X, and not at all compatible.
You'll notice just about every communications standard that doesn't go long haul alternates back and forth between parallel and serial methods every few years just to sound new and exciting and better.
11*43+456^2
How the hell is this any different/better than using SunFire servers and Sunray thin-clients? A Sunfire V480, 4 900mhz UltraSParc III processors, 16 GB RAM, mirror 73gb disks. This system ran 100+ Sunray thin clients all running continuously updating graphical simulation displays with 3 or 4 other semi-rigourous processes, on a 100mb LAN. All data and programs were NFS mounted. The V480 was ~$40-50K + $300/sunray (already owned monitor and file server).
The system was spec'd by Sun to handle those 100 sessions. The head engineer bought two and set them up to load-balance and provide redundancy.
This isn't anything new...move along.
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There's a product called Buddy that's been doing this for many years. Originally, the Buddy card was a combined PCI video card and PS/2 keyboard+mouse controller, which spit all the signals out an 8-position modular jack (RJ45 for the cretins), and a little breakout box at the other end of a (long, shielded cat-5) cable accepted the monitor and input devices. The software gave two Windows95 users the impression that they were the only one on the machine, and I'm still not sure how they did that on a non-NT architecture, but it worked and worked well. Only trouble is, the video bandwidth of the cable was limited, and the RAMDAC in the video card didn't support sync rates over 60Hz, so the flicker on the slave station was pretty obnoxious.
In the years since Buddy was first released, PCI video cards have learned to play nice with their neighbors, and USB has provided a way to connect oodles of keyboards and mice to the same machine. Thus, Buddy is reincarnated as BeTwin, a software-only product that associates specific keyboards, mice, and video cards with specific sessions on the machine. (I'm not sure how it deals with sound. Multiple soundcards would seem easy.)
They say it only supports 5 users, but that sounds like an arbitrary limit and I'm sure they'd tweak a 28-user version if you felt like it.
Related links... I'm going off-topic here, but playing stupid tricks with virtual hardware is fun.
Check out MaxiVista, a "virtual video card" which Windows treats as a second monitor, allowing you to do multi-head tricks. The data for the second display goes out over the network (a la VNC) to a client machine, which simply pipes it into the video buffer. Turn that scrap laptop into a second monitor! I stuffed a 10base-T card in my old lappy and it was perfectly usable for everything except fullscreen video. At 100 or gigabit, it'd be worth a try.
Xinerama is Linux software that does the same thing, creating one large virtual X display, which then chops up the image and sends it to a number of smaller actual displays, some or all of which can obviously be located across the network.
As long as we're doing silly tricks with virtual hardware, you should be aware of Virtual Audio Cable, which enables digitally-perfect audio patching between applications' outputs and inputs, even if the apps themselves think they have exclusive control over the soundcard. (Also enables multiclient sound output under 9x, even if your card doesn't support it, because it does software mixing.)
If video is your thing, try Softcam, to feed your videoconferencing software any old source you feel like. Switch between actual cameras, use your desktop screenshot as a "camera input", add effects, etc. Their WaveMux tool is a nice complement to VAC, too.
In the old days, there was one big (relatively) powerful computer with a bunch of terminals hanging off of it. This computer was called a Mainframe.
As time went on and miniaturization progressed, people wanted their own department computer, so they could have more CPU time available.
Then they wanted their own desktops.
Then they wanted to network their desktop machines, so they could share data.
Then some applications started sharing CPU and other resources over the network.
But all these networked machines were a big configuration hassle for IT. They envisioned "thin clients" and similar solutions.
Now machines are so powerful that users can have their own virtual PCs running on a central server, so they can just have dumb terminals on their desks.
There's a lesson in here somewhere. As soon as the network comes back, I'll google for it and find out what that lesson is.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
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It'll work with Linux, but you need a patched kernel. See here.