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Converting Desktops to Thin Clients?
tfiedler asks: "I manage about 3500 desktop computers and was recently asked by my CIO to begin looking into thin client computing, something like WYSE terminals. I'd like to know, what are some good functional, and more importantly, manageable options to convert existing desktop computers into what would essentially be a Citrix terminal? I was thinking some brand of Linux that starts up an X11 session, starts the Citrix client and connects to our server farm. The user would see a Windows logon, our apps would function as normal and I'd get the benefit of performing a LOT LESS client-side maintenance. Any suggestions?"
Check out sunrays. They are dirt cheap and they now have a windows version of the software. I use them at home they are really that easy to setup. We run a windows and a linux sunray server here. 2 Servers that I upgrade every 2 years and then we have about 10 terminals scattered throughout the house. I'm on one right now actually. It's a simple solution and fairly cheap to deploy.
There exists some positive integer N that you are the Nth person to read this signature.
Even 20 years ago, we were using rdist on Solaris (or is it rsync?) to totally automate updating of clients, and then we were NFS mounting the home directories, so that they are on the server and backed up. So you get most of the benefits of local computing with local CPU etc, and the benefits of no client maintenance because it's all automated and the home directories are backed up. Why does Windows make it so hard?
Dave Richards, sysadmin for the City of Largo, Florida has been documenting some of his work with choosing and setting up thin-clients.
They have a server for each application (Firefox, OO.org, GNOME, etc) and use HP thin clients (set to be in use for 10 years), and manage to provide a great service, including all the new fancy XGL-like effects.You're may be looking for the Linux Terminal Server Project.
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
If the desktop computers have network adapters that support booting from the network, you can use PXE to turn the machine into a thin-client.
There is an excellent free utility for setting up the boot image to load from a TFTP server called ThinStation
We have a remote office where I work where everyone connects to a Win2K3 server with Terminal Services. I suggested PXE as a method of connecting rather than having a full-blown copy of Win2K installed just to run the TS client on boot. It worked great but as yet, has not been adopted.
Here's a suggestion straight from the BOFH that might work though; Spin off a company to test the citrix rollout. After a couple of weeks of using citrix anyone who finds it acceptable gets moved to the new company. Then mismanage the new company into bankruptcy. You'll have gotten rid of most of the deadwood at your company and the citrix rollout will die the ignomious death it so richly deserves.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
We use this where I work.
Essentially we have little sub-1Ghz client boxes with 512MB RAM and no hard drive. They boot off ethernet via PXE, grabbing a kernel and then mounting the root filesystem etc via NFS.
Newer setups have the client files in a vserver (google util-vserv) which allows for some convenience in seperating the server's components and those for the clients.
Some apps run locally on the client's processor/RAM, while others are run remotely "ssh -X" with the GUI piped back.
I'm trying to setup something similar at home, with a server image that should allow friends to connect and use 'nix while at my house (for rounds of frozen bubble, or whatever). You could email me (form on my website) if you want more info.
My old employer decided to update from 486s to thin client, this was a few years ago. I remember there being some serious problems initially. They ran a Windows 2000 server which the thin clients would connect to, but one day they got a worm... This rendered every single PC unusable, we couldn't type letters, work on spreadsheets etc. We couldn't even access the accounts, which is very bad for a finance department answering calls from customers.
It was fixed, but the downtime was costly, we could only really do filing. If your server goes down, then everybody is screwed. If everyone has standalone machines at least they can still do basic tasks.
Try PXES. I used it at a high school to netboot old desktops ( I think I used etherboot, with all nics embedded, so it didn't matter what nic was in the desktop), to download pxes, which would then connect to the X11 box to run all the applications. It features RDP, X11, NX, and others perhaps.Download here.
With the equipment available in this day and age, really thin computing where the desk local equipment does nothing but citrix/rdp/vnc/x forward from a server doing all the work doesn't usually make sense. As you say, doing all that stuff in a centralized way will be suboptimal and latencies annoying. You may be able to get the work done, but do not think for a minute your overall productivity and expense will go as you want them to.
The other end of the spectrum, everyone installing local applications and keeping most of their useful data offline on their disk all the time is also a nightmare in terms of maintenance and data reliability. You can address these, but at significant pain...
What I'd advocate is somewher in the middle. Essentially, disposable interchangeable workstations. Networking infrastructures can serve up filesystem access pretty well, and with the right set up, a client system's install can contain no data worth backing up. I.e. my home directory is nfs mounted on my workstation, and my mail and calendar stay on the imap/caldav servers. In my case, the workstation is linux and the company has an apt repo setup with all the important applications. The other day to test whether my setup allowed me to migrate freely, I got a different system, hooked it in, and within an hour I had my full setup on another system.
I don't have to endure the pain of high latency display nor do I put a huge memory/processing load at a place where the company has a hard time managing it, but at the same time my data does go right to a place they can easily manage and backup. The file access is slower a bit, but the company has a fairly beefy and robust setup that doesn't bother me too much.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Disposable clients not thin clients are the answer for manageability. The cost savings of opting for a truly non-capable display-only device over a competent computer is essentially non-existent. Trying to pack all your processing overhead and memory into a centralized place will more than offset any perceived client-side savings. If you plan for it and can use the right tools, you should be able to go from an unconfigured blank system to a fully functional system with access to any arbitrary users data in under an hour. If you want to cut down workstation outages, you could do diskless with more RAM to have ramroot (if your OS allows), or switch to solid state storage. Fans of course will remain an item to service, but should be exceptionally painless to swap out that.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Basically you're talking about running tsclient on some Linux distro. Since you don't care about local capabilities, pick the lightest and fastest booting distro using the lightest window manager, or no window manager at all. Tsclient will run in full screen mode, so on a LAN it will feel pretty much like Windows.
Awkwardness will set in at the intersection of the remote world and local resources: while local storage (e.g. USB flash drives to take out/bring in data) may not be a big issue, printers sooner or later end up being a real PITA. Networked printers can work well enough (even though you tend to see all the company printers available, which in a larger installation can be A LOT), but local printers can be a pain and get you back into the customized client situation. It gets even worse with other peripherals like scanners, which can lead to a lot of compatibility issues with remote software trying to access a local scanner.
Our problem here is that our main accounting app is on a unix box and we use a terminal emulator to access. However our vendors have the purchasing info/programs on the web, and pretty sure AT LEAST one requires IE. Thus we need windows underneath. It was pretty disturbing to realize we need a Hyperthreading Pentium 4 or better to efficiantly emulate a DUMB terminal under windows or the firewall/AV chokes the response rate too much :(
:/
:(
;)
We use a web browser, a DOS billing program(that requires Windows installer to load!!...i was gonna build a DOS network with old computers for this part since they are isolated and the program came from a 386-25, damnit), a simple windows billing program and some basic Word and Excel stuff, nothing that requires more than a P3...except for the security software
Nothing like finding out a Dumb terminal emulator is a dog on a 1.6gHz box, shesh
Anyway, sorry for so offtrack thats been bugging me to no end
Everything i thought of always had at least one good gotcha in it, best of luck. Watch out for what will trip you up several steps ahead.
Never did come up with a better plan than faster boxes....anyone need a pentium 3 ?
Admittedly, this is the higher-end solution, but since you have 3500 desktops, I don't think it's unreasonable to think you already have or can get the infrastructure.
Using iSCSI or fibre channel, configure the NIC or HBA to boot from a pre-assigned lun. All of your backup worries vanish, because you are already backing up your storage arrays, and there's no local disk to fail. At the very least, there's disk redundancy.
Taking it even further, make all these desktops 1Us in a data center and use an Avocent system (or similar) for a KVM console at the user's desk. Now you have the best of both worlds: a computer dedicated to your user, but physically untouchable; and centralized backup, control, and troubleshooting for the admin.
Look at the Crashing an In-Flight Entertainment System story that seem like it is run on some kind of thin client system.
Actually, what you describe seems to be gaining a lot of popularity lately. CIOs already got the picture that managing PC endpoints is a nightmare, so I guess it makes sense to put them back in the datacenter, either by using physical PC Blades (still expensive), or a shared solution (such as Citrix or X-based desktop sessions).
The latest move, and the one I really like, is using virtual machines hosted in the datacenter. In that way, you can have a single VMware ESX server for example with let's say 40-60 desktop VMs running, each one of them with their own single-session ICA or RDP connection (for Windows) or X, NX, Go-Global, VNC, or whatever else you want to use, traditionally using a front-end connection broker (Citrix, Propero, Wyse, etc).
This approach is called VDI or Virtual Desktop Initiative, and it can leverage Wyse terminals, LTSP, Sun Rays, old PCs, you name it. The point is that the VM is yours. You can do whatever you want with it and that can't affect other users like a shared session would. You don't need to deal with application-level conflicts either, as each VM is completely independent from each other.
I've seen this solution installed in several large organizations with off-shore development teams, where the VMs are hosted in the US while the remote users just establish sessions against it.
Disclaimer: I work for VMware.
I would suggest a hacksaw, a dremel, and some duct tape. Those should be able to make any desktop thinner.
What you're asking for is what the citrix-loaded WYSE terminals do automatically. You choose which model terminal (and which OS, they have both linux and windows based ones) and then set the level of local access (allow local apps, allow local USB drives, allow local streaming media, etc).
You then set up your citrix farm and away it goes. You can either have a full session, so that the user thinks they're using windows on a workstation, or you can have each app running 1 by 1 as the user launches them from the terminal.
Last I checked the terminals were about $200 each if you go with the linux ones since you skip having a windows license for the local box.
Their biggest customers (i.e the Fortune 500 companies) are sick and tired of the cost of supporting locally-installed operating systems that they've put serious pressure on Microsoft to come up with a solution. In the not-too-distant future, there will be an "enterprise" version of Windows, where nothing is installed locally. Basically, you'll be able to sit down at any PC on your company's network, log in and your "profile" will be downloaded to the PC you're sat in front of - not just your desktop preferences and IE shortcuts - all the software you regularly use will be "installed" and ready to use.
D.
I've been looking at some Mini ITX based Set top boxes been sold for £40 in odds and sods. Failing that you can get a very good solution using old Citrix Clients thrown out or sold for bugger all on Ebay. Neglecting the monitor my last Semperon 3000+ box was £80 all up with out the HDD. Basically the choices are legion.
Thin clients are supposed to lessen the management of PCs. All apps would reside on a central location and depending on your implementation, either run on a beefy central server or on local machines. The problem with the former is that you have a very expensive central server that's usually completely inadequate for desktop applications. Now this may work for the subset of users that don't need the traditional desktop tools. But in this case it would likely be cheaper to web-enable those critical apps or look at some of the web application suites (I think Google just released one).
The problem with the latter (run on local machines) is that this is taking a PC and crippling its functionality. If your users' PCs are just glorified terminals then this is easy. If not you'll get all the cost of a PC and little of its benefits.
If your boss insists on thin clients there are a few things you can try:
1) Set up a fairly powerful server with vncserver instances with locked configurations.
2) If you're trying to reduce PC maintenance, try running applications from a central server. This works for almost 6 different applications that don't require local registry settings.
3) Take the PCs and throttle down the speed to 800MhZ to simulate running apps remotely. To be fair, only some apps will slowdown. These apps include those that require graphical output or user interaction.
4) Replace your network. RFB is chatty and puts a tremendous load on your network. Simulate it by running all NICs at 10Mbit/half.
I have planned and deployed thin clients across local and wide area networks and all have been successful. While the situations you describe can happen, they can be easily avoided with proper planning.
Citrix's main (and some would argue only) benefit is the ability to minimize the hassle of dealing with poorly written, bloated "enterprise" software.
I work for a company that just rolled out a new piece of software to 9000 workstations . The software was well over a gigabyte in hard disk space, required us to upgrade almost half our workstations, needs to be patched at least twice a month, and has serious issues with anything but a pristine network connection to the database (they require less than 40 ms latency and the software refuses to run on a wireless connection). We're looking at using Citrix JUST to handle this software. The downside is: Citrix is incredibly expensive. Last I heard, Citrix client licenses were somewhere in the neighborhood for 450 bucks a seat, in addition to TS cals, server licensing, and windows licensing. We ran a pilot Citrix farm with our nameless software and got 25 users per server. Each server had 4 gigs of memory and a pair of new dual core Xeons and cost about 6000 dollars apiece. If you're running reasonably well written software, Citrix isn't worth it.
ThinStation is a Linux-based very thin client that does little more than set up a remote terminal connection. It boots off CD, Network, or even a HD if you like. You can store config info on a floppy or network if you want.
From the web page: Thinstation is a thin client Linux distribution that makes a PC a full-featured thin client supporting all major connectivity protocols: Citrix ICA, NoMachine NX, 2X ThinClient, MS Windows terminal services (RDP), Cendio ThinLinc, Tarantella, X, telnet, tn5250, VMS term and SSH.
Using the CD-boot option it's a great way to recycle old PCs today, without waiting for a PXE server to be set up. Just make sure all your network cards and video cards are supported.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Why don't you go to fibre? (disclaimer: I'm not the netadmin and I may be full of shit) I think we just negotiated with Time Warner Telecom for 25Mb at about $1000 a month. Prices have gone down a lot, maybe you can get a better deal?
Always selling!
Install the clients as linux terminals. http://www.ltsp.org/
Connect them to a mosix cluster http://www.mosix.org/
Use rdesktop for those apps which still need windows. http://www.rdesktop.org/
I've been on all sides of this. Sometimes it's good. Most of the time it isn't adequate.
Many applications don't work well in a Terminal server environment. So we need (you guessed it) Windows on the client.
Other applications' licenses don't allow use on a Terminal server. So we need (yet again) Windows on the client.
Today remote users (for some reason) have latency that is too high to be productive on the Terminal server. So we'd better have Windows on the client.
The secretary who only ever uses Word and Outlook is now required to watch a training video on her computer. So we need Windows on the client.
At the same time a P3 can usually (depending on your "security" software) run a terminal server client and those one or two other things that need to be local. However, then you have to manage all those clients. You would be amazed at how much less work it is to manage Windows when all you have on a computer is a terminal server client and a few other applications. Especially if you lock them down well. To ease the management of these thick clients (for literally this situation) my employer had me create Tiotha (http://tiotha.sourceforge.net/).
Warning: The 0.15st version of Tiotha on the website has a horrible memory leak. I hope to release the update very soon!
I will not mourn that which I never had to lose. - Unknown
I created a custom Gentoo install that used a custom GDM 'faces' theme to display icons for each Citrix 'app' (these were really one user account per application with the .xinitrc and .icaclient ini files setting the app/login when the user clicks the icon--no password necessary since they get prompted by Windows to login). This is actually a great way to do it when your unix skills are where mine are (not a guru!) because when the Citrix app closes, bam, the user's back at the GDM login screen. I'm sure one could whip something up in python or tcl/tk, but I don't have time to learn that.
/djs/
Anyway, Citrix is the way to go because the Linux ICA Client lets you make the local floppy and optical drive or even local USB devices available to the user's session on the server. (For this you'll need to learn a bit about udev to make sure the usb devices are always mounted at a specific mount point that you can configure in the Citrix client.) It really worked like a charm and the user could plug in a flash drive or insert a CD/DVD and voila, it's right there on the Citrix server for them. You can even get the audio to work.
I created a boot CD (two CDs) that would let me install the setup to any PC with a CD drive. Thankfully we are standardized on NVidia video cards, so I didn't even have to worry about autodetection for that.
Before you go to all this work though, make sure they've already deployed some kind of thin client in a pilot that can do everything I've described. If it's missing any of that, the users are gonna hate it.
Build your config, save it, then burn it to a livecd - boots into vmware player, loads image and boom - online - totally stateless, to un-futz, just reboot.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
A lot of problems associated with thin client computing have little to do with the computers and terminals themselves; if you ignore the fact that your dependancy on the network is going to be an important part of keeping your thin clients working properly, it will likely cause more problems than solve them.
Redundant switches and network cards in servers will help increase the available bandwidth and avoid leaving possible single points of failure. Also, if your budget allows, try to seperate the network the users access the servers on from the one that serves file shares, backups and administrator access. It will go a long way to improve the service available to users of the thin clients.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And wouldn't it be nice to just install a CD and have them boot up as Xterms. The cost of 3000 CDs rather than 3000 new Wyse terminals.
Deleted
First warning... end users that these terminals are targeted towards typically HATE having to use a terminal like this where the software is served remotely. Unless if you have enough server bandwidth and they are local enough to be able to deliver the needed software at a speed similar to using it locally on a PC, you're going to be doing nothing but frustrating the end users. For people that really need to do the work, they want their software to run as quickly as possible so they can get their job done as quickly as possible. Running it remotely is only going to slow things down.
Second warning... if you're going to do something like this, PLEASE understand that each person has a different function that may require different software. You have to make sure that each person has the software required to do their job, and to do it well. If they don't have the required software, you have to make it an easy/seamless process to get that software. Nothing makes a job suck more than upgrading the local hardware only to find out that the software one needs to do the job has not been made available and they have to wait while IT figures out how to make it available to you over the coming weeks.
The company I work for (a major luxury car manufacturer) is trying something like this where we're basically running on dummy terminals, but they never bothered to find out what each of us really needs for our jobs. We've had these new terminals sitting around for months not getting touched because the basic software we need to run the warehouse (yes, I'm on the warehouse side of things) is either not available through that terminal, or once it is, it is EXTREMELY slow. You don't mention whether or not those 3500 PCs are in a single building or location or not. If not, serving software from a remote location is going to be extremely slow, and as I said, it will really frustrate the end users.
If it were me, here is what I'd do (note: I'm not an IT specialist at all, but I'm an end user with more computing experience than most in my company):
1) Don't do dummy terminals. Go with real PCs. The users will be much happier in the end if you do.
2) Do a survey. Survey EVERYONE. Find out what people use. People in a single department are LIKELY to use very similar software. Some may use one or two things more than others, but it will still give you a baseline. It's better to have someone with two extra programs installed that they don't use than have a user that doesn't have the software they require.
3) Build a series of disk images based on people's needs. These are your backups. If something needs to be seriously fixed or upgraded, do it on the disk image first. Then put it on a test PC. Let them try it. Let them give you feedback and let you know how it works for them. Make sure that everyone that is getting upgraded has a chance to mess with it.
4) You want do so some storage remotely? Give the users remote storage space, and stress to them that this is to be their primary storage. Save their files there. If possible, save their settings there. If you're going to be doing Windows, if I recall correctly, there is a key that can be changed to make any location the default "Save" location. Make it this remote "drive" or "directory" to help encourage saving to the remote storage. This way when there are software updates and a PC gets re-imaged, their files are safe. Along with this, you have to also make people aware of company policy regarding the software they have available to them and what they can use. Basically boil it down to this: If there's something they need to get your job done that the company hasn't licensed, then they need to work with the company to see about licensing it. Otherwise, each re-imaging is going to wipe it out because it's not sanctioned.
5) Image the PCs with those disk images according to your surveyed results.
This way you kinda-sorta have the best of both worlds. The users have software running locally on the PC a
*slight crashing sound*
Use LTSP and you can convert all 3500 existing desktops into terminals without purchasing new hardware. Perhaps you can convince your boss to let you have 10% of the savings.
my company was recently looking for a terminal service solution. Because we sell our software to mostly small companies, it is sometimes too expensive for them to buy MS Server 2003 just to have 5-6 simultanous rdp connections, so we were looking for alternative and we found http://www.xpunlimited.com/where they state
that their product
'XP Unlimited turns your Windows XP Professional System into a full blown Terminal Server, without any limit.'
we found them just last week so haven't deployed their software yet, but probably we'll go out and acquire.
Price can't be beat; unlimited connection terminal server on plain old winxp for just 125$
from my undertanding, they found a way to expand already present RDP in winxp pro.
It's going to cost nearly as much money to deploy this, perhaps a lot more (factor in server cost, and perhaps some network upgrades, along with the client itself). Your workforce will be terribly unhappy (latency, inability to use a REAL bloody computer), your support staff will have just as much to do trying to coax 99.999% uptime out of your servers/network, and there is a long history of implementations like these that were quickly reversed.
Do you have any real world experience with this? I do.
I volunteer for a school where I've built a network of 2 linux terminal servers, 1 LDAP/Samba server, and 65 thin clients.
I'm a software engineer by day, so I'm only able to help out the school an hour here or there on a day off. 65 hard drives out in a lab and classrooms would be a nightmare for me to maintain.
Thin clients typically have few moving parts, so they last forever, and they can be made from basically junk+ a 15 dollar bootable NIC.
All I have to do is ssh into the servers and do upgrades or software installs.
Just make sure you use decent server hardware and backup power supplies on them. You can buy a good server for the cost of only two full workstations these days.
Overall the savings on the TCO is enormous.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
As other people on here have said, this isn't a good idea. You're going to need to spend money on upgrading your network, buying new terminals when you already have perfectly good PCs, and you're going to need to build a server cluster to ensure that there is no down time. With 3500 users 5 nines isn't good enough, even a few minutes of down time is going to cost you $TEXAS.
You're much better off setting up some Unattended install scripts and then setting everybody to use a network share for their documents directory, a SAN or NAS would be fine for this. With the proper security settings and group policies you shouldn't be spending that much time on fixing desktops, unless you have a lot of hardware failures.
You also don't want to introduce a single point of failure, which is what running everything off a central server would do.
We run lots of thin clients. We started with some HP/Compaq units, running a Windows CE version. But we are replacing them with a Linux based TC from Neoware. The neoware advantage is centralized management, and an OK easy way to push new software out. Look for a client management software as oart of the solution
Currently the workstations runs a Citrix Client and in many locations a 3270 terminal emulation software.
The Citrix servers needs all the RAM they can get, this is usually the bottleneck for number of users
The last system I designed had 130 seats as Linux thin clients and I could tweak the whole system without leaving my chair in seconds. I had redundant servers ($1500 each) instead of redundant clients and it took only minutes a day to verify that everything was OK and it was for months. Not one incident of malware disrupting anything. The users migrated from needing a full time geek to re-install that other OS several times each year on each client to having machines as reliable as telephones.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
The truth is the typical thick client is idling at a small percentage of CPU load waiting for a mere human to read and click. The idea of server centric computing is to give such unused power to the next guy. My AMD64 3000 (1.8 gHz clock) can please a whole room full of people (I have run 30 simultaneous users) on this basis alone. If you add to this caching of files, huge buffers, and RAID storage, you should ask, "Why would anyone want a pokey thick client that needs software and hardware maintenance and replacement every few years?" My server cost $1200 to build (about $50/client). Programme loading and file serving uses no bandwidth. I have everything on the server. I have gigabit/s bandwidth and 30 megabits/s is plenty for one client.
For 3500 clients, you could install 120 servers like mine of 30 quad core machines or 20 quad machines with faster clocks. The multi-opterons do cost more but you can put way more than 4gB RAM on them.
In case anyone is wondering, I run Linux, not stuff designed to run a single user.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
I switched to Linux when I had just five Windows machines that crashed daily just when someone needed them to perform. I put Linux on out of desperation and the same hardware ran six months without downtime. People who use that other OS just cannot get their minds around a system that works, has few bugs, costs little, and is flexible enough to do whatever we wish.
Many cannot imagine watching a programme run on one machine from another machine. In the Windows world, that is two points of failure. In Linux, it is the way the display system works. You can have as many displays as you have resources and they do not have to be on the same machine. Bandwidth is only an issue if everyone is watching movies instead of working...
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
Here's what we've found so far:
We're actually doing pretty well with this, but don't forget that some positions in the enterprise just can't function without full-blown PCs. Hosting things like engineering or CAD apps is not worth the effort.
You'll still need servers, of course, and your servers will need upgrading, but it's a lot more concentrated and efficient.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks