Windows Thin Clients - Worth Making the Switch?

Brendtron 5000 asks: "I work in the IT department of a major Canadian university. I've been given the task of investigating the pros/cons and costs associated with switching from Windows desktop machines to some kind of thin client solution. Both student lab and administrative machines are up for possible replacement. At first blush it seems that the cost savings will be considerable, given that thin clients are much cheaper and easier to maintain than a user controlled desktop machine. What were your experiences with switching to/managing thin client environments? Have the users been happy with thin clients? Did the cost savings materialize as expected?"

Comments

using thin clients at a call center

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using LTSP to serve thin clients at a call center for almost six months now (Linux, not Windows, though), and I can honestly say that all the problems I anticipated never materialized. In fact, the biggest issue has been callers sticking gum in my CD drives.

Setting up LTSP is a snap, thanks to the great wiki at http://wiki.ltsp.org/ and the very helpful people on the mailing list.

The *really* hard part is just getting through your brain how exactly thin clients boot off the network, and establish a connection to X remotely. Once that starts to make sense, you really can get it working quickly and easily. There are just so many variables to start off with (NFS, X, XDMCP, PXE, DHCP, TFTP, Etherboot) at the beginning that there's a real learning curve. Once it's working though, it Just Works(tm). It's great.

Just setup a decent firewall to block outgoing stuff to where you don't want them to go, and make sure you give the clients lots of options when it comes to software. Working in a call center can't be the highlight of anybody's life, so I made sure to give them their choice of 4 window managers (GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Flux) and I put all the little games on there to keep them happy in their downtime.

The problems I worried about the most never materialized -- there's no process load, the connection is really fast never laggy (even with 35+ users connected all at once), and everyone picked up really quickly how to switch their preferences around, log in, and get their work done. I never should have put it off as long as I did. It's so much easier than having 40 separate windows installs to worry about and reflash / reinstall / reconfigure when one gets any kind of problems.

And last of all, with LTSP you can throw *any* kind of cheap hardware in the mix, and they all run equally fast. I had a few Pentium 100s on the network for a while, and you couldn't tell any difference in performance compared to the Athlon XPs.

Re:using thin clients at a call center

[NefariousAryq]

We also use LTSP, but in a completely different style. We operate an event photography business, where we go out and photograph all sorts of school events and sports; Soccer tournaments, Baseball tournaments, Show choir competetions, etc. Three years ago, we were printing thumbnails of the images we took, where parents could view them, and place an order on paper of what they wanted. Now, due to LTSP, we have viewing stations. Most weekends we deploy between 12 and 18, depending on the size of the event -- but we have, and have the ability to operate 30 at any one given event. We've done events where all 30 were in use at one time, and everything works perfectly. We have a custom-written web-based application which handles everything for us. We dump the photos into directories, Imagemagick comes in and makes all of the thumbnails for the parents to view. The thin clients run IceWM with Firefox in a customized/trimmed-down full-screen mode, which automatically boots up in that mode, with the application as the home page. Parents can then view the photos right there, on the screen, add images to their shopping cart, and complete the checkout process. We initially looked into Wyse thin clients, using a Windows-based server setup. The cost was going to astronomical, in licensing fees, compared to what we ended up paying using Linux and LTSP. Our server runs Slackware, which we did go ahead and purchase to support Patrick. The server, which I built, is a dual opteron setup with 2gig of ram. It handles everything we can imagine it needing to do. Alright, I've gotten a bit off-topic here, but thanks to LTSP and Slackware/Linux, we're kickin. :) ~~Aryq~~

Worked great with Unix

[hazem]

I used to work at a school as a sysadmin where a vast majority of the machines were Tektronix X-terminals. We had Sun Sparcs and linux boxes on the back-end running FVWM.

From an admin point of view, it couldn't be beat. They rarely had problems. When they did, it was usually because paper got sucked up underneath and blocked the air intake. But even when there were problems, you just swapped out the pizza-box. And talk about quiet.

We only had one die - someone spilled cuppa-soup next to it and it got sucked up inside. Yuck.

This approach is great any any environment where you want consistent software settings, etc. We had 2 application servers. Want to install/upgrade applications? Just put them in 2 places, and everyone has it.

We also had a few "power" machines with the heavy duty-aps. Just SSH over, point your terminal to your screen (a script handled this by default), and you had all the power you need.

I had a lot of lazy days back then. Then we started turning them all into windows boxes... and I had a lot more work. It was sad.

I would hope that windows via thin-client would be as nice as it was with unix... but it sounds like the costs are just as bad.

Good luck.

My experience

[Devoir]

I've done some work for an education instituion who wanted a multi-site, low-cost upgrade to their network.

The decision was made to go ahead with a Windows Terminal Services-based operation. The decision was helped by the fact that they were an educational institution with volume licence key access, so there was no cost in relation to that.

A Dell twin-processor server was ordered and setup with the standard host of software, integrated into their domain and ran like a charm. The clients were setup with ThinStation, which is a phenomenal piece of software. This alone has enabled them to save tens of thousands of dollars simply due to hardware considerations. A new site which they took over had a number of machines which would be considered out of date, or subpar. This included first and second generation Pentium PCs, etc that would not have been considered for 'active duty' if they were required to run Windows XP with the latest and greatest productivity suites.

At this point I should mention the initial deployment was planned for only the administration PCs, but due to the performance, savings and general ease of transition, management has indicated they would like to move forward with classroom deployment soon.

All up, this single server is operating up to 50 clients at any one time, and due to the fact that it's running Terminal Services, their remote site bandwidth requirements have decreased fairly significantly.

The time it takes to setup the ThinStation software is far outweighed by the time it would take to create and deploy a full image, and there is an additional benefit that everything is exactly the same no matter which staff member accesses which terminal.

I'm unsure how educational licences operate in the organisation mentioned in the OP, but if it's anything like my experience, then the labour costs, hardware costs and sheer frustration cut out from dealing with an equivalent non-TS environment are definitely worth it from the point of both myself and the client.

Excellent for Managability, Steep Initial Curve

[W. Justice Black]

Obligatory Background:

I currently work for Sun's Network Systems Group (x64 servers). I use a SunRay to do the vast bulk of my work every day. I have run my own SunRay servers (running Linux) for over two years.

I used to work for a company called Taos, whose user infrastructure was entirely Windows Terminal Services + Citrix Metaframe. Another SA and I ran their terminal servers for my entire tenure there (about 2.5 years, plus I was doing application development at the same time).

The Response:

Those who hate thin clients (TCs for short) tend to do so for the following reasons:

1. Initial procurement cost and software licensure is no cheaper than desktops. For some software (the Citrix bits in particular), it's significantly more expensive.
2. Users can't (or damn well shouldn't be able to) run arbitrary software--the joke "screensaver" that their friend sent them, for example ("screensavers" are just eye candy anyway--who cares about saving a CRT anymore?).
3. Performance with certain apps (video in particular) is highly network-bound and potentially crappy.
4. Limited number of points of failure, so a dead server can affect many people.
5. "What do you mean I can't plug my webcam/phone/food processor in there?"

Most of these arguments are lame, because:

1. Thin client hardware has MUCH better longevity than its desktop bretheren--five or more years out of TC hardware is the rule, not the exception.
2. Users shouldn't be running arbitrary software anyway in most business settings.
3. Performance with most other apps is stellar, as the first user to load an app "greases the skids," putting most of the app in cache for everyone else.
4. If you do it right, you have configured your server to be relatively bulletproof, and have one or more backups (typically folks don't have backup desktop machines :-/ ). Plus, many people's work is network bound--a dead conventional server means people can't save stuff or can't update the company database (or whatever they're doing) anyway, making the desktop of little real use when their related servers (or the network generally) go down.
5. Is more-or-less valid. There are some devices that simply will not work when attached to TC hardware (though a surprisingly large number of things will). Whether that's really a problem or not is in the eyes of the beholder.

You also get the following benefits out of TCs:

1. No crawling under a desk and facing the Dust Bunny Army (tm) to replace a dead drive, or removing 20 lbs of personal effects to upgrade someone's RAM.
2. True centralized deployment of software--no guessing if an app got installed or WTF is actually on someone's hard drive (deployment solutions for PCs other than ghosting the whole drive have this nasty habit of being fidgety).
3. With some solutions (Citrix in particular), you can "publish" an application, making just one app available to those who MUST use a PC, so you can mix-and-match your clients if needbe.
4. Usability over slower WAN links is usually pretty good (especially with Citrix).
5. Some solutions (particularly SunRay on Linux or Solaris) allow session "portability," which means that you can start typing a sentence, pull out your card, walk down the hallway (to, say, a meeting room), plop in your card and finish your sentence. To those that have never tried it, this seems silly. To those who use it daily, it's a Godsend (like those who are addicted to TiVo, SunRay session portability is something you just have to "get").
6. TC hardware is generally SILENT and consumes very little electricity.

SAs, like any users, hate TCs because they're "limited" in what they can do. The smart ones end up loving TCs precisely because users are limited in what they can do. That said, you also have to deal with the real TC problems:

1. Some apps just won't behave, or they require a ton of work to behave. This problem has gotten better with time, but stories abound of ba