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?"

Comments

sun ray's!

[Nova1313]

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.

Re:sun ray's!

[apachetoolbox]

After a minute or two of googling I think the Wyse S10 are a better choice. They connect to RDP servers and only cost about $280.

Not sure that's the way to go

[countach]

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?

Linux terminal servers

[vinsci]

You're may be looking for the Linux Terminal Server Project.

No

[Greyfox]

Thin computing is a buzzword companies throw around when the balance sheet is drifting into the red and the CEO doesn't want to give up the corporate jet. Ultimately the latencies are unacceptable, network outages paralize your entire company, and unless you're doing a lot of stuff that does't require computers in the first place the entire effort will not only fail, it will fail miserably. Look at ANY company that has attempted to deploy graphical thin clients and you will find nothing but failure. The guys at Sun will try to tell you that they have thin clients and it works great but this is not true. All the guys who do real work at the company have either laptops or SunFire machines on their desks.

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.

Re:No

[Demon10000]

I'm going to call shenanigans on this.

I'm employed by a company that has approximately 5000 users. A few years ago, we had about 80% Desktops and 20% thin clients. These days, we're about 20% Desktops and 80% thin clients, and both the Technicians and our users couldn't be happier.

The difference between a Citrix implementation failing, and working successfully is knowing the technology that you're working with. You can't have an application thats going to go rouge and take down your server with 50 users on it -- and that is where most implementations fail. Every application can not be made to work in a thin environment.

Looking back, I can't imagine supporting all those users on Desktops. We have a 40 server citrix farm and 5 techs to support both the users and the servers. A good implementation goes a LONG way!

We use this

[phorm]

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.

Try pxes

[sfire]

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.

Options

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Citrix

[pasamio]

I rmeember trying this onea few years ago. Someone opened a worm infected email 10 minutes before the scheduled antivirus update at 9am. It only took that ten minutes to take down the entire head office of the organisation with thousands of desktops infected. Funnily enough in some places Linux boxes were used as routers on some gigabit networks. One of the techs told me afterwards that it was laggy connecting to the computers because the gigabit links were full of this worm attacking the entire network. My mates got home at 9pm that day after disinfecting the entire network. So yes, whilst in client-server if the server goes down you can't work, but its still easy to fix one server than thousands of desktops. Plus the one (or more) servers are typically in one location physically, which makes things that require physically rebooting the machine easier (keeping in mind that your network is now shot with computers trying to infect each other and the rest of the internet).

Windows is a single point of failure

[pogson]

I worked at a place one year where MSFT decided to override our settings to "upgrade" to SP2 and our whole system needed reinstallation. We did not have enough storage to back up every client so I had to go through the whole system customizing clients. It made my day. In systems I design there will be no Windows.

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.