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Thin Client, Or Fat Client? That Is the Question
theodp writes "If virtual desktops are so great, asks Jonathan Eunice, then why isn't everyone using them? However encouraged folks are by the progress virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has made, and however enthused they may be about extending the wins of server virtualization over into the desktop realm, you don't see analysts and developers eating the virtual desktop dog food. And even the folks you meet from Citrix, Microsoft, Quest, VMware, and Wyse — the people selling VDI — use traditional 'fat' notebooks. So, are you using virtual desktops? Why, or why not?" I wonder how long the abbreviation VDI will stick around.
So I moved to Europe. Now all my clients are thin and as a side-effect my sex-life improved greatly.
Videographic performance is one sticking point.
Developers won't generally use them ... as with so may computer related things these days, VDI is not about usefulness, it's about control. It makes it easy to lock employees down to a standard desktop, and provision or restore them with minimal effort. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not really aimed at developers.
Employers love thin clients because they give more control over the information moved in and out of the organisation. You don't have to worry about blocking Lady Gaga CD-RW disks if the user only gets a picture of the data anyway.
But then the same limitations create a constant demand for new solutions to work around problems which should be simple. How can the PHB work on the plane? What is a switch dies and takes out sixteen users?
I have seen thin clients used successfully in a doctors office, where the integration requirements are simple. I can't see it satisfying every requirement in the engineering environment where I work.
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I've yet to meet a salesman who will claim with a straight face that the thin-client solution works well when one is traveling and working out of hotel rooms and client sites on a regular basis.
At work we all have latest generation laptops that end up working as dumb terminals through VNC. A bunch of servers and a load balance connection hub to always route you to the least used one make sure no work is lost if the laptop drops or is stolen, and with current network speeds, it's pretty much like working locally, with the added benefit of an 8-core beast compiling for you, and little to no maintenance on my side. If anything, I'd love for things to go thinner. I lug my laptop, which is heavy enough, from home to work and back every day. Then at work I dock it to use the 25" screen and full keyboard on my desk. If I could just have a small device that acts as a real dumb terminal with some processing power and minimal storage, I'd be happy.
To do list for Windows
Virtual desktops may be "almost" as fast as the real thing, but native performance is still native performance...
> If VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) is so great, then why aren't you using it?
Eunice isn't saying that, he's quoting Brian Madden as saying so and then gives his opinion on why he thinks they sooner or later will.
You can tell because of the sentence directly before the one quoted above:
>Virtualization analyst Brian Madden asks an excellent question:
But hey, fuck accurate summaries, right?
If you're a CIO and have to worry about installing, patching, upgrading, and supporting hundreds or thousands of desktops, you want thin clients so you can manage this kind of thing at the server.
If you're a user, you want a fat client because they are more responsive with more task-specific UI design, and often have more features. You are less likely to land in twenty-open-tab-page hell with a fat client. And you don't have to worry about web popups, Flash cookies, JavaScript malware, browser history, browser security warnings, and all that other nonsense associated with the web while you're using your enterprise application.
Does anyone know of any reputable services that actually sell virtual desktops? I'd really like some sort of centralized place I can log on and have things set up like I like them, be able to store files, etc. but haven't been able to find a place that just offers that, just whole servers.
Actually, if it happens it will be fairly gradual, the result of ever-improving infrastucture and improved technology at many levels. Just as the Pocket Computer / Smartphone has evolved gradually. For example, the Apple Newton failed, whereas the iPhone was later a blockbuster. Why? Lots and lots of reasons. Some of them, such as faster/cheaper/smaller processors and networking, apply directly to virtualization as well.
From my understanding, Citi is almost exclusively virtual desktop oriented, whether you work in the office or remotely. In fact, you have to get executive approval to get a laptop issued to you. Personally, I am not a fan of virtual desktops, especially if your work requires unique tools (cygwin, wireshark, customized troubleshooting apps, etc.) like mine does. In addition, if you work remotely that means that YOU provide the machine the desktop will run on, which pushes the cost down to the user. I don't agree with that either.
It is a win for companies however, if they're interested in getting rid of real estate while keeping headcount.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Really, this is so simple. There aren't suitable thin client options for most businesses. And Microsoft is to blame. No, this isn't an anti-Microsoft rant - there's no reason for them to support (or more accurately, PUSH) such a model. It boils down to this: Windows is hardly "thin client" status anymore. Computers are dirt cheap. Buying a thin client machine costs about as much as buying the cheapo level desktop most businesses need (the ones that need more powerful hardware aren't suited for thin clients, eg: CGI and video editing). Microsoft used to (still may?) charge the same license fee for the thin client as they would if it was a full fledged desktop and full OS.
Thus, what's the purpose of spending the same amount of money for a thin client machine that one would for a full fledged desktop and full OS?
It doesn't matter how wonderful the technology behind thin clients is, or how wonderful it gets... it's a waste of money for most scenarios.
And of course, Microsoft's business model is in better shape without thin clients... more support people, more certifications, more money generated. Smarter business approach for them.
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Until you need multimedia. Most can do audio decently, and small silent videos or animations work OK too. But if you need high-quality video with audio that's actually synced to the video...no, not there yet (if you can restrict video entirely to Windows Media Player, newer Windows-based thin clients may be able to do the trick via some RDP trickery, but WMP isn't exactly known for its wide codec support, and the "thin" clients have to be beefy enough to do decode the streams they are passed, which isn't very common at the moment)
The control it adds is great but the end users will hate it to the end of the world. If you have any network issue at all you no longer can do anything at all. At least now with thick clients you might have slow or no access to network served apps (email, web, etc) but your local stuff is still there. You can write an email even if you can't send it, you can finish up a powerpoint, or at least play games until the network comes back. Thin client + network down = pissed off and useless employees.
'Fat client' setup: client workstation + coprorate file/print/app servers.
'Thin client' setup: client workstation + VM servers + corporate file/print/app servers.
Given that cost to buy and maintain client workstations are very similar, 'thin client' setup means throwing money into maintaining VM servers to achieve worse workstation performance due to CPU and network contention.
So why bother?
My development environment is a Xen VM or two.
My client is not thin though. I run the window manager, browser, mail client, IM application, SQL application, and a few other programs on the desktop, and use ssh -X and sshfs to do my development work on the VM.
I have tried running everything on the VM via XDMCP, VNC, and NX, but it is just too slow anywhere but on the LAN. Until I have a 100Mb connection to my house (instead of the 2Mb/384Kb connection with 50ms ping times to google.com I currently shell out $55/mo for) the thin client does not work.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
I have a customer who has 1,500 desktop all have been using thin clients for five years now. Now these are Trusted Solaris using Sun Rays, giving them access to multiple classified systems from a single thin client and we replaced five physical desktop under each desk. So we reduced cost, and given the customer more flexibility. Plus now they have 2 24" monitors on each desk with multiple "Desktops" open. Another customer likes the ideal of not having to replace workstations every 2 -3 years. It all matters on the Goal.
should there be no client? The desire of big business is to centralize everything. The liberation and free user period of the 80s and 90s is over and now its all about the borg. So get over the argument and silly questions of 'to be or not to be' and realize that regardless the motion of the ocean is a big bone in your IT ass dicktated by Apple, M$haft and the wannabees or hazbeanz.
It's all a matter of connectivity. If you're using a traditional "fat" desktop (or notebook), you're self-contained. All your software's there, you aren't dependent on any connectivity to the outside world to get your work done. A "thin" virtual desktop client, by comparison, is completely dependent on having a network connection to it's host server to operate. Without that connectivity, it's a doorstop (and a light-weight one at that, so it doesn't even do very good at blocking a door open). And in a world of corporate firewalls and filters there may not be any connectivity that the VDI client can use. Anything other than HTTP/HTTPS may be blocked completely, and HTTP/HTTPS traffic will usually be forced through a proxy server that, even if it allows the kind of streaming connection a VDI client needs, introduces so much delay that the desktop becomes useless. And that's when the network's working correctly. Add in random network outages and traffic congestion at the wrong times and corporate systems that require non-corporate machines to VPN to the corporate network (and to have specific anti-virus and management software installed before the VPN's allowed to connect) and it makes a VDI client distinctly unreliable and hard to deal with. Meanwhile, the guy with the "fat" notebook may have more system management headaches and software synchronization issues than the VDI system, but he's still getting his work done while the VDI guy's sitting twiddling his thumbs while the techs try to sort out all the problems.
I have to differ, i do as i preach and have been using VDI in some form or another since i started 'pushing' virtual machines at the office.
If *I* cant run it, how can i tell others to?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think VDI is great and would jump on it in an instant as an IT Operations Manager. However, as long as Microsoft is raping everyone over licensing small / medium companies will never adopt. You have to have software assurance or an Enterprise license in order to be within Microsoft compliance for VDI. So if you're the typical SMB who buys a laptop with OEM windows and simply keeps that part of your refresh cycle, you have to pony up as much as 6 figures to rebuy all of those licenses on top of any new thin client hardware. In the end, the costs of licensing, man hours, and end-user training just don't add up to keeping the status quo. Sure there are other benefits like decreased support costs, but convincing a CFO to repurchase windows licensing (that's how they see it) would be a fight not worth having. Of course, if you're part of those fortunate companies that are active in an EA contract, this is all moot and I say make the change.
It's simple; at least from my perspective in the US. The US simply does not have the ubiquitous broadband infrastructure to make "cloud" / "vdi" computing practical. Your elite users most likely have laptops - so even if that have access to great broadband at their home and office, what do you do any where else? You're either at the mercy of the hosts' wifi you're leeching or you're tethering - meaning you have a 5GB/mo allowance. Sure, a lot of computer have 3G modems built in, but then you still need a pseudo-thick client to boot into so that you can connect to the 3G network - which may vary in quality quite drastically, not mentioning that even at full berth, it's still probably not a very pleasant experience. By the time you figure out all of the bullshit work-arounds to give a mobile user a halfway bearable and consistent experience, you might have just installed Windows and been done with it. And yeah, you're probably going to use Windows because the users just have to have MS Office - both because they know it, "everyone uses it", and "it looks pretty"... whereas, you know, Gmail is ugly. Internally, Active Directory pretty much gives you all the control and manageability you need for a Windows environment without the need to buy and build completely new "virtual" infrastructure - and not just hardware; there's endless licensing bullshit to consider. Microsoft has spent years carefully crafting their lock-in strategy to secure the market. Unless you're moving to their cloud, you've got a lot of retraining and compatibility issues to consider. And why even start thinking about possible problems when we still don't have the necessary internetwork to support such a paradigm in the first place. Cloud computing and virtualization may very well be the future of computing, but we're still in the alpha phase, and unless you have the money to afford the best of the worst cloud/vdi resources available, why does it even matter? And considering the economy, it should be no surprise little to no one is scrambling to adopt.
True, they use 'fat' laptops to travel, as no net = no workie = pissed off client .. But all the ones i know use vm's ON the laptop.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Really, I'm not interested in controlling a remote desktop. What I really wanted was my own private cloud to store and sync all my data to/from my various "clients".
I looked around and didn't find a solution that let me stream my media, control all of my home systems, have encrypted backups of my data distributed among the PCs of my friends and family, along with a native app & a web interface to rule it all.
Just s/friends and family/other offices/ to apply these needs to business.
VDI is not the solution I was looking for. A turn-key "local cloud" where I control all of the data is what I want. I've glued several FOSS solutions to achieve this, and am testing a new cross platform system of my own... Remote Desktop can kiss my ass, all I need is the data (processor speed & RAM are cheap; The "thin client" of today is a behemoth in yesterday's standards).
People just want to use all their data on all of their hardware. Ultimately we must either run our own servers or trust a 3rd party to "host" it for us. I opted for the former because the latter gives me the willies.
Thin clients are great for situations where lots of users need identical environments. These days, people who do data entry need little more than a Web browser to do their work. It makes sense to use thin clients for that kind of work.
Developers, on the other hand, have to have a set of power tools for their work. These power tools don't perform well on thin clients, and can sometimes destabilize the entire server. Rebooting the machine, an task that can be frequent for developers, would disrupt work for everyone else working on that server.
We developers aren't pigs, it's just the nature of our work.
What you must run? If everything is web, a pendrive with a live distro could qualify. Other alternatives could be LTSP or even Chrome OS. Now, if this is for running windows you lose anyway in costs, security and probably even administration
problem solved.
Anybody want my mod points?
I've seen thin client networks done badly, and I think if you factor in the cost of having a large part of your business unable to work due to a single router flaking out, or your citrix server farm doing something wierd and eating everyones work, you might have eaten up any savings from purchasing and servicing traditional fat clients on desks.
An occasional one-time saving on cost is eaten up by [sometimes massively] amplified on-going cost in any downtime you inevitably face.
Suggested addendum to the powerpoint presentations I know that drive these bussiness decisions: Your network infrastructure better be damn good. You also better not think it's a great cost saving strategy deploy your thin client infrastructure to remote sites with dodgy WAN links.
Laptops as hybrid thin clients make a lot more sense - your business could get up and move. Now, I've seen that done well.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I've been using vitual desktops since FVWM in the mid 90s, and it has nothing to do with what this guy is talking about. I'd think Slashdot would know better, but of course times have changed. Am I going to have to start calling it Spaces now?
I'm going to call BS partly on this. Most of the business world is using basic productivity software, probably Microsoft Office, with some users needing access to an accounting package or CRM. Thin clients aren't so much about up front cost as they are about reducing long term support costs. Using thin clients in an enterprise or small to medium business environment gives you a lot of benefits to the long term bottom line. From a security perspective, you cut the "attack surface" of your network very sharply - from dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of desktops that each need antivirus, security updates, administration, and security monitoring, down to a handful of servers that you can lock down pretty tightly. From a support perspective, you are no longer managing all those desktops, you are now managing a handful of servers. You have all the data for your organization where you can make sure backups are happening, and where you can keep tabs on what data is being stored and where it's stored, so you no longer have to worry about that file with a million customer social security numbers or credit card numbers sitting on someone's desktop, where you won't find out about it until after it walks out the door. Also, with a good setup, you ease the pain of patch days a fair bit, since you don't have to chase breakage across all those desktops, just across the app servers. You remove the expectation of user control because a thin client is clearly not a desktop (the "but I can do it at home, why can't I do it here" syndrome). These are damn good reasons to go to thin clients on the desktop, even if the up front costs are the same or even slightly more, and they apply to most desktop users. Only "high-performance" application demands, like CAD, and software development need fat desktops. Now, on the laptop side of things, internet connections in the field aren't something you can count on, even with mobile broadband and wifi penetration, it's not always there, and it's not always good enough. so thin clients aren't going to make much headway there for a long, long time.
It doesn't matter how wonderful the technology behind thin clients is, or how wonderful it gets... it's a waste of money for most scenarios.
Thank you. You hit it. Thin client is great in hospitals for hot desking, it works great for some trading organisations who want to centralise certain aspects of their business, lawyers who don't want information leakage and all sorts of other things. I have seen (and designed / implemented) these solutions. It's just another tool in the tool box. You use it where it makes sense, in a lot of organisation the requirement to properly administer these solutions costs too much more than running their environment half assed which still satisfies the user requirement.
The whole virtual desktop solution is massively expensive and works only in a small subset of situations. The cost of bringing everything back to the rack, the requirement to have everything on SAN as opposed to local disk, the IO requirements of it means you need a decently sized SAN (And that's not cheap).
Thus, what's the purpose of spending the same amount of money for a thin client machine that one would for a full fledged desktop and full OS?
Well, I don't know how you did your math, but you sorta screwed up some numbers somewhere along the lines.... Thin clients are cheaper, you need to look at patching, and managing all those machines, warranties, and everything else. Thin clients mean that there is no local profiles, no local domain requirements, a stripped down windows means no patching and if you do you netboot the machine and serve it out over TFTP on a saturday when nobody is around (Including you!) and just do another run later to deal with the exceptions. Your down time on a properly implemented thin client solution is a LOT lower than what your going to end up with using standard desktops, as a CTO though, your going to have to realise that your going to pay higher wages to get the right guys who understand the technologies and can properly administer it.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
I have been forced to do my development on a virtual machine at work. I can compare the performance well because my home and work machine are almost identical spec except for the virtualized bit. Note they both have an SSD and quad core.
Performance is pretty good, but not good enough to make the switch worth it IMO. At home I never wait for trivial action to complete, like opening an application. At work however, sometimes the machine will lock up for a few seconds, which is enough to distract me. The feeling of, hmm its stuck, when is it going to complete, will usually drive me to check my mail/rss which makes focusing harder.
Business wants control and has the money.
IT wants control and needs the money.
Business hates IT. Why would they allow their end users to get stuck with very low CPU-powered devices with lots and lots of limitations rather than run a full PC that costs 5x more annually to run but **can** let them watch youtube? They wouldn't.
That's why VDI doesn't work outside IT.
Also, most networks that I've seen are using 10+ yr old switches and probably can't handle the strain that VDI would put on the overall networking between different buildings.
VDI is really simple provided you stay away from Windows on the desktops/end nodes and avoid Windows servers.
Client workstations = Linux something (512MB RAM + 1 $30 CPU + 1 5GB or smaller disk)
- rdesktop
- NX-client
- Web browser (Firefox)
- NFS mount user HOME directories so any workstation can be used by any user.
How it works?
Use NX-Client to remote into Linux servers for thick applications.
Use rdesktop to remote into Windows servers for thick applications.
Use as many browser-based apps as possible - like Zimbra for the communications server.
Since you aren't running Windows, end users won't be able to load non-approved apps unless they become technical enough to load packages into their HOMEs. Most people will not even bother. You can setup the HOME with a quota that simply doesn't have room for programs to be loaded and you can mount with the 'noexec' switch to make it just a little harder.
End users will hate it at first, then they'll learn to love it since any computer issue will always be hardware or networking and solved by a workstation swap. No local data is stored. It is all on the server.
AV isn't really needed on Linux machines and the servers that do need it can all be professionally managed.
Best of all, you will be able to slowly through Microsoft out of your network and get off their never ending upgrades and mandatory hardware upgrades.
I keep a few Linux instances running on some VMWare and KVM based servers on my home network. The desktop systems run vncserver and I can access the sessions remotely from any system in the house. Though I run some of the same apps locally, there are enough reasons to run them on the central server.
1) The types of apps I need are not available easily on the client. For example, I use some photography related apps under Ubuntu. These are free and easily available via the Software Manager. The same quality of apps are not available under Win7. For example, there are some HDR utilities I use in Ubuntu that work quite well. Similar software under Win7 or MacOSX costs $40 or so.
2) The netbooks I've started to use don't have the power needed to run some of the larger apps. Though my main laptop (CentOS 5.5) can handle it, I have some Atom based systems that have issues running a JDE or full blown dev environment.
3) I have *many* client devices. At last count I have 10 laptops in the house. These run CentOS, Ubuntu, MacOSX, Win7, WinXP and Fedora. This is unusual for most households, but reflects the type of environment I'm seeing in smaller businesses. No matter what client I use I can run my set of apps.
Using a modern thin client is pretty much like using 50s era time-sharing systems, with the exception that the modern variation slaves inferrior microprocessors to a more powerful cluster of devices, instead of slaving pure IO devices to said systems. The question then becomes if you are carrying a device that is in itself more powerful then the systems in use even 5 or 10 years ago, what advantage does connecting to 'the cloud' holds over the advancements in computing technology that originally allowed us to move away from this computing model?
Fundamentally the issue is data security and usage control. There is no advantage to the end user, only the content providers who maintain the system.
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The promise of thin clients has never been on upfront costs. The advantages have to do with maintaining the clients once they have been deployed. Think patches, service packs, O/S upgrades, memory upgrades, HD replacements, etc. With traditional desktops many of these changes can only be done by going to each machine individually. Additionally, thin clients make backup/restore trivial whereas trying to enforce data retention standards on desktops is always a battle. While these issues may not present themselves in a small to medium sized company, trust me when I say that with thousands of installed desktops there are hundreds of people dedicated to maintaining the hardware and managing the environment.
I'm not sure what you mean by "there aren't suitable thin client options for most businesses." Most of the actual business of say a bank, or an insurance company, or a web vendor, or just about any company that isn't a full fledged software developer comes down to a few apps that rarely require huge amounts of memory, the latest video card, or even a hard drive since most of those apps just run as a client and save data on the server anyway. In fact I can think of few businesses where thin clients shouldn't represent the majority or installed systems.
I work for a large US bank that is currently trying to force VDI on everyone including those for whom it is a poor fit (developers and engineering staff, etc.). The cost of the servers plus the cost of the thin client hardware is _FAR_ more than what we can buy PCs and laptops for, even after they cheaped out on the servers by using compute nodes with inexpensive and poor performing raid controllers. The performance is dreadful as we're running a bloated Windows 7 desktop with Office 2007. User profiles are constantly becoming corrupted requiring recreation. People in my area are spending large chunks of their time with the Help Desk and support teams. Many of the apps themselves are even virtualized further using Microsoft's App-V, formerly Softricity. When you need an app that doesn't run well (or at all) on the VDI client they tell you to access it via a Citrix session which is also very expensive to run. I'm waiting for the CIO to finally have someone clue him in to the costs and watch the entire thing unravel.
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Asking why tech companies don't use thin clients I think is bringing up a poor point.
I think they're pushing them as a way to have cheaper consumer machines. I'm not entirely sure they'd expect people to run eclipse on them.
However a clueless consumer who never bothers to back up or update is actually better off using things like Google docs and gmail if they primarily surf the net and use email and Word.
Likewise I'm sure Google view Chrome OS as something more for your grandmother / mother than your next development environment. That said you do find companies using the cloud and things like Google Apps more often. So they are moving that way too but they're going to be more selective about it.
google shopping "thin client" nets me a 1.6ghz 1gb HP model at the top of the list for 342$
in 2008 around that same cost I got a 2.6ghz X2 with 4gb 500gb DVD burner and a frikin geforce 9600GT
so for me screw thin clients, maybe if a decent spec-ed one was less than 100$ I might look into it
but then again I just put together a 1.6ghz dual core atom with 2gb 160gb and a dvd rom for less than 100$ that is not that much bigger than a thin client, so whats my incentive other than having a case that is only a couple inches smaller, no storage, and no media for 242$ more?
We just need widespread adoption of Linux as the primary business desktop OS and rampant use of ssh -X.
I think that saying about Chrome is also validate about thin clients
There are a lot of positions out there where workers only have to hit a dedicated system on an internal web server, and occasionally hit other web pages. For this, thin clients are low maintenance, secure, awesome.
For any job that needs more flexibility, this breaks down badly.
Anytime I have seen them, the user requirement for a computer such as a call center was minimal or a organization with very little IT staff so it helped with having one person to manage the clients and if one broke, swap it out quickly. The big plus of them is forcing what your users can access, knowing their work space is secure, and controlling what comes in and out of the organizations network since the workspace is in a container. Ya they are easy to mange and simple but with most of the SSL VPN devices out there now offering a similar controled desktop cache, the need for them is getting smaller and smaller.
Bryan
And even the folks you meet from Citrix, Microsoft, Quest, VMware, and Wyse — the people selling VDI — use traditional 'fat' notebook
It seems kind of obvious that people who have a need for notebooks are not the target market for VDI. A portable computer is likely intended to be carried outside the VDI workspace where it rapidly becomes an unworkable model.
Am I missing something, or is this a really poor point to try to bring into this discussion?
Adobe Acrobat Reader is awfully slow under RDP. Some of the other PDF viewers are better but not by that much. Unless they can fix that, RDP isn't going to be a solution for anyone I know.
It seems you havent run IT in a medium to large business. When I ran about 1/3 of IT for a fortune 50 company, we had hundreds of client application profiles. Thousands of unit and division developed applications. A sales organization that couldnt work with IT as they felt they had to move faster than we could at screwing up their stuff. Just migrating from one operating system version to the next took so long it'd have happened faster if we just put the new OS out on replacement machines and let it happen by itself.
Let me ask a different question: if thin clients are so great, why did we move away from the mainframe model to the networked pc model? And if thin clients are so good, why dont we go all the way and go back to the mainframe model?
Lets see: better and more consistent power on the users desktop for about the same price, no problems with network overload/congestion/downtime, no problems with back end server congestion, no problems with one piece of gear hosing down dozens or hundreds of users, and the price for both solutions might actually favor fat clients.
This isnt a technology problem, its a business problem. We went away from mainframes because IT couldnt possibly provide all of the applications, customization and uptime on a centralized architecture than we could on 'thick' PC's. Thats why we went to that and its why we'll stay there.
Thin clients have their uses(though the hardware costs are bloody usurious for what they are. For some ARM widget or a geode board I should not be paying as much as a low-end dual core desktop with HDD, CD/DVD drive, Windows licence, etc.); but there are annoying pitfalls:
With your classic Citrix or MS Windows Terminal Server, you end up paying once for the backend servers(fileservers, DB, internal web stuff, etc.), once for the terminal servers(to keep the thin clients going), once for the thin clients, and then it is happy-fun CAL time. You can re-ghost a lot of flakey client machines for that money. Worse, the number of applications that just. don't. quite. work. right.(or at all) on Windows server vs. Windows Client or RDP/ICA vs. local terminal is surprisingly large. And this isn't just fancy 3D or HD video stuff, where not working right over a fairly high latency link is expected, this is large amounts of benign-looking 2D software that just breaks when it sees a server OS or trips on some subtle single-user system assumption(one of my personal favorites was an issue with Flash that showed up in some citrix environments: if you logged in to the server locally, or went in via RDP, Flash worked normally, was installed, etc. If you logged in via ICA, even as an admin, Flash would simply not appear to be installed. No Flash-using sites would work. Period. The fix was munging some obscure registry key, for reasons unknown to any mere mortal(including Citrix support...))
Dealing with shit like that can eat up a lot of admin time on your ostensibly "efficient" centralized system. Worse, since fucking up a citrix box can ruin it for a whole bunch of users, you have to tread softly and otherwise treat the servers like servers. Citrix being a brittle bastard doesn't help(Why sure, why shouldn't updating the JRE by a point release or two break the system horribly?). Users, for good or ill, want their updates, and their flash plugins, and so forth. Unless you are dealing with crazy-secure requirements, just letting relatively inexpensive desktop admins cowboy around, swapping out and re-imaging the occasional broken config, actually seems to result in more happy user hours than does your carefully curated citrix setup.
I can only hope that the VDI-style "one desktop VM per user, spawned dynamically" at least solves some of those problems; but it is still worse than it looks...
The only thing that makes my computer mine is my data (OS, apps, documents, etc). None of the places I work have the sort of connection that could be relied on for speed and availability to make a Thin Client a workable option, so I'd rather sneakernet my data with me and connect it to whatever computer happens to be around to make it 'mine'. Properly encrypted and backed up at any given location of course.
I'm not actually doing this of course, but it's something i'd like to try.
Listening to everyone here talk about all the IT administration benefits of VDI I am reminded why most IT organizations are so out of pace with their businesses. Not that the enhanced security, control and back up are bad but the cost in end user and business agility is simply too much. Need too roll out video conferencing on the desktop - sorry too bad (I know there are some exceptions), need real mobility - sorry too bad, need to install some new system that doesn't play nice in VDI - sorry too bad. What if you want to access outsourced or hosted services, now you have to ride back to your server, then ride out to the internet or VPN, all in all not a good solution for majority of users.
Why would any user voluntarily give up the features, and freedoms of local computing just because the IT guys say it makes their job easier. The answer is they won't. Thin will remain where it is now a very effective niche solution for basic application access. The future is fully functional multimedia mobile clients with access to secure services provided via your own data center or some outside cloud provider, not a wyse terminal.
A while back my local University library used a pile of green screen terminals for the catalogue system. It was announced that at great cost it was all going to be upgraded to PCs with MS Windows some time around 1994.
The result was that instead of a terminal with easily readable text you had a telnet window with tiny text, terrible response time and a few extra steps before you could do everything. Pile on about four or five virus incidents a year (kids tried to put games on them from floppy) that took the entire lot down and a lot less PCs than the terminals they replaced due to cost and you have a debacle that kept costs high enough that they couldn't afford a web based system until about 2005.
I think the theory was the PCs could be used as something other than terminals. In practice that didn't happen - no CDROM access, no web browser, no text editor, no ability to print what was in the terminal window. Just expensive PCs as dumb terminals through five versions of MS Windows.
Granted, I'm working in a highly secure environment with secure images, so we are all over the VDI for development. It allows my dispersed developers world wide organization of death and destruction to work in a large team environment while being in Europe, Florida, California, Washington, Japan, Hawaii, and Singapore. And yes, I am being completely serious.
It does allow us to provide a central pool of tools that make changes without dealing with the local machine that is controlled by another agency.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Does a CR-48 count as a "thin client"?
In my university, IT uses thin clients all over. They're placed as computers in residence halls, in the libraries (along with a lab of dual-booting Macs in each library), and in the campus center. They use ~3 different servers that different buildings connect to, but it makes it easy for them to manage software things especially considering i imagine it saves on licensing costs
Well, I don't know how you did your math, but you sorta screwed up some numbers somewhere along the lines.... Thin clients are cheaper, you need to look at patching, and managing all those machines, warranties, and everything else. Thin clients mean that there is no local profiles, no local domain requirements, a stripped down windows means no patching and if you do you netboot the machine and serve it out over TFTP on a saturday when nobody is around (Including you!) and just do another run later to deal with the exceptions. Your down time on a properly implemented thin client solution is a LOT lower than what your going to end up with using standard desktops, as a CTO though, your going to have to realise that your going to pay higher wages to get the right guys who understand the technologies and can properly administer it
*I* understand all of that. *YOU* understand all of that. **Most of those on Slashdot** understand all of that.
Now... tell me which boss of any decent sized company understands all of that? And which ones see it as a waste of money for the reasons I indicated. I know I should have made that clear above... but I figured we'd all experienced those situations where justifying such expenses/purchases for legitimate reasons get shot down by those in upper management that dont understand squat about technology.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Thin is a relative term, and bandwidth was a serious problem with the organization that I used to work for. We were spread out all over the place, and many of our platforms were mobile. The thick client only had to move the data, but the thin clients were fussy about the pipes. So, speaking for one user, thin only worked well when I had a fat pipe.
For your first paragraph, see my post directly above.
For the second... banks rarely get thin clients - yet pretty much run telnet apps with some specialized drivers for the printers, MICR readers and bill counters. They barely need a thin client. Sadly, they instead run full blown copies of Windows with a telnet window and some web apps.
Sad, isnt it? Perfect client base pushed in the wrong direction.
As for "there aren't suitable thin client options for most businesses" my point is this... Windows 7 is hardly thin client capable on what WAS thin client hardware. Even Citrix WinFrame and such require something decent for such "thin" clients. And while the up front costs are the same (and support costs less), most businesses dont think about such things and look at it the wrong way, as I covered in my last two posts. THAT is what makes it unsuitable.
See my point? It doesn't (or rarely) matter(s) if it's suitable to the TASK. It matters if it's suitable to the CUSTOMER BASE one is targeting it at. And sadly, nowadays, it is not - otherwise banks, insurance companies, numerous chain stores, restaurants, etc; would all be running thin clients. I know I should have clarified further. Hope this does.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
"Let me ask a different question: if thin clients are so great, why did we move away from the mainframe model to the networked pc model? And if thin clients are so good, why dont we go all the way and go back to the mainframe model?" I love this argument. Short answer: Technology. Why did we leave mainframes? Because we could have a computer at home. Why don't we all go back? We are, and will. Why? Because of the Internet. If the Internet (broadband) existed in the mainframe era, we never would have left mainframes.
At my place of employment, 250 employee co-operative retail with three locations, I set up a 2 node DRBD/Heartbeat cluster. It is running NFS, Samba, LDAP. Clients, 42 of them, g are $275 Zotacs(Mag HD-ND01-U) running Ubuntu 10.04. I developed a disk image with everything the way we want it. It takes me 10 minutes to set up a new machine and most of that is the unboxing part. Clients authenticate via LDAP and mount NFS homes via autofs. Some apps are local such as Firefox and Thunderbird. Other business apps are accessed via A XenApp/Citrix server using the Citrix Native Linux client. And then there are the HR and Finance SAAS applications. Now the clients could just offer a RDP connection application and the Citrix server could be a server providing virtual desktops. But why? It would add a few more layers of complexity with little benefit. The client machines are cheap, fast, easy to replace. The OS is free. The user gets the performance of silicon on the desk with the storage reliability of a server in the closet.
Guru Meditation #6d416769.21610a21
When the clients are universal and disposable, maybe you will understand. Focus on the future, not your current limitations. As the great John Lennon once said, "Some may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not..."
I work for a company that, amongst other things, makes laptop security software. Anecdotally, one of the reasons we see a slow adoption of 'thin' clients in mobile fleets is the reluctance of enterprises to deploy wireless broadband (cellular) cards into their laptop deployments. If you have 1000 laptops, at $50 per device per month for mobile broadband that's another $2.4M for wireless data over the 4-year life of the laptop. A tough pill to swallow, and you can't expect your mobile employees to constantly seek out free WiFi. Until internet connectivity becomes ubiquitous at a much cheaper price point, clients will stay thick...
Interesting, I was thinking about doing something like this too. What FOSS software are you using to do this?
Crysis on RemoteFX
Starcraft 2 on RemoteFX
I'm going to call BS partly on this. Most of the business world is using basic productivity software, probably Microsoft Office, with some users needing access to an accounting package or CRM.
This brings us to a point I made earlier about much of this stuff no longer being "thin". Please, oh please, try to run Office 2010 on a true thin client setup. PLEASE. Do try. Now, once you've gotten your THICK client computer, running your THIN client setup (wait... is it Windows 7? Is that thin client possible? Or is it "thin" client possible?). Now explain the added expenditure in new server hardware to support your "thin" client setups.
Then explain why much of the stuff needed to do ancilliary work (ie: surfing the web for whatever reasons; research, visit competitors' sites, visit client sites, visit suppliers sites, etc) just wont work on a true thin (software AND hardware) client setup... oh yeah, because browsers and (ugh) Flash need better hardware. This (all of the above and what else I mention in other posts) is what brings us to the "unsuitability" factor.
It does NOT matter if it's the best technical solution to the task. Those with the expertise to know that are NOT the ones generally in charge of the purse strings.
It makes PERFECT sense from many TECHNICAL standpoints to implement a thin client setup. As far as businesses are concerned, because most are NOT run by tech savvy people, it makes NO sense.
Gotta remember, things work because of the IT department. Hard to convince a non techy person to spend more money - or the same amount of money for "less" when the system already works. Does that now make sense?
Thin clients aren't so much about up front cost as they are about reducing long term support costs. Using thin clients in an enterprise or small to medium business environment gives you a lot of benefits to the long term bottom line. From a security perspective, you cut the "attack surface" of your network very sharply - from dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of desktops that each need antivirus, security updates, administration, and security monitoring, down to a handful of servers that you can lock down pretty tightly.
Well, that's not entirely accurate. But close enough. Anyway, I have covered that all below. *I* am aware of this. *YOU* are aware of this. Most upper management in mid to large business are NOT aware of this, and CANNOT be convinced of this (hence, too numerous places to count that SHOULD be running thin clients do NOT). If the IT department is doing their jobs, NONE of what you mention is a problem to begin with. Hard to sell someone non techy on a solution that they will get "less" on to solve a non-problem (because the IT gang knows what they are doing).
NOT JUST TO YOU - BUT TO EVERYONE:
You ALL forget this is about why thin clients aren't being adopted and aren't suitable. This has NOTHING to do with the accurate technical reasons you all suggest. If you had remembered that when you read my post, perhaps you would have understood the context of it.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
If you dont believe it, open your eyes. I saw them in: city administrations, insurances, university administrations. At many of these places the thin client runs a simple terminal applicaiton (up to around 2005 these places often had real terminals) to access the terminal-based solution (often more efficient than "web 2.0", especially when operated by somebody who knows the right key combinations since 20 years), plus now having the advantage of reading a word document if something slightly non-standard happens (and instead of filing a typewritter-written letter it now goes in the database), or of sending an email.
In short: People whose work requires only very well defined form of interaction and not watching videos.
We left mainframes because they were slow and expensive and they got to be more expensive than a desktop.
That is still true today. To give your VDI some decent performance you need SSD's or 10k RPM disk cabinets, a couple of 8-core servers and a very good interconnect between it all. Then you have to deal with the licensing which isn't very cheap. Total investment cost for decent performance on just 20-50 virtual desktops is usually around $40,000 and you'll still need thin client systems near $200 a piece. You can get computers for under $500 that will give you the same performance as your virtual desktop.
Even if we had broadband Internet back in the day, the Internet (and any network for that matter) is too unstable to be acceptable. If you think about the amount of things that can and frequently do go wrong (DNS, DHCP, LDAP, BOOTP, TFTP, switches, cables, capacity) on top of what is basically a full computer on both sides you'll understand that in many situations it isn't what you were looking for.
The places it does make sense for is where it is going to be used. High-risk (of data or physical theft) or very uniform systems (such as call centers, single applications, kiosks, cashier stands, classrooms, ...) that require both a minimum of management and minimum interactivity.
There are other solutions besides using VDI. If data loss because of device theft is an issue, use encryption. If any data loss is an issue, use networked data/home drives. If you want a uniform system booted every morning, use netboot.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Take a look at Oracle's Sun Ray thin clients. They are completely state-less (No hard drive or OS to manage), everything is in your server room. You can use smart cards and go from one Sun Ray to another with your desktop session following you. On the server side you can use VMware, Oracle VM, Oracle VirtualBox, Xen, etc as the servers for your Windows, Linux, or Solaris sessions. It's a very light-weight solution and easy to setup. The plus side is that thin client has a built-in VPN client so you can use them from home as well. There are even 3rd party vendors that make Sun Ray laptops. I think it's better than all of the mini-PC options running Windows, since they still require hands-on management.
There is so much FUD in this topic. M$ and "partners" try to upsell this technology to make sure they can tax it. If you run GNU/Linux terminal servers and simple X window system clients you get all the benefits of virtual desktops at much lower costs: cheaper servers (more processes per gigabyte and no licensing fees), cheaper thin clients (no need for gB of RAM or hard drive) and better performance (files are cached in RAM on the server or retrieved by a hot RAID). I use this technology a lot. I get 5s logins and 2s opening of windows to huge apps even using old PCs as thin clients. The usual VDI solution involves one virtual machine per client, a huge waste of resources although flexible. If you want low cost and reliability keep it simple and stick with GNU/Linux. It costs about $30 per client to have a good server on-line. New thin clients can be bought for less than $50 and used ones cost nothing (old XP machines are $0). Don't listen to the FUD. Go all-in for thin clients and forget the VDI bloat. Use GNU/Linux.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
I use thin clients (on fat machines though) to poke at the machines 40 miles from me at our captive ISP. But when graphics performance starts to be an issue, thin loses to fatter machines. It can be mitigated with smarter thin clients that are specialized, but then thin is a bit less thin. And as network bandwidth at 100 megabits or better becomes, 1 available, and, 2 reliable without latency issues, then thin clients may make more sense. But thin clients in graphics applications are essentially broadcasting a dedicated streaming video feed and the bandwidth for millions to do that in a major metro area just aren't in place ... yet.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Why don't we all go back? We are, and will. Why? Because of the Internet. If the Internet (broadband) existed in the mainframe era, we never would have left mainframes.
Are you on the ChromeOS team? :P
Except for the hardware bits, this is a non issue: See Shavlik, Zen (does it still exist?), SCCM, etc.. Hell, my crappy little office (4K users) does patches & updates using a combination of WSUS & SMS. If we really needed to, we could deploy .msi packages via AD (Please no.), or logon scripts.
As far as the hardware goes, In ten years I have very rarely seen shops that actually update hardware. (exceptions to the rule: Computer savy users (eg: (un)helpful admin proxys); admins) Usually the top dogs have their oldish stuff pushed down the line, and stuff gets thrown out when it depriciates: Too much trouble to buy new memory to upgrade. We want everything the same. Like eMnim.
Anyway, that's my $2 The issue that usually kills VDI is licensing. It's an expletive. Out of curiosity, has anyone used any of the application virtualization products? Symantec (slogan: Where good products go to die;) has one where you can roll out apps in a para-virtual manner with delta updates & rollback capabilities. I saw another one recently where a VM with the OS+application stack was pushed to client machines & managed from a central template. (At least that's what the marketing drones said.)
From the article:
The Web is a nice compromise between thin and thick. Especially with Chrome and newer versions of browsers allowing work offline.
Disclaimer - I am a Citrix Sales Engineer.
There are a couple different technologies that tend to get grouped together (as can be evidenced by other replies within this thread). I'll give some examples, but keep in mind they will all be Windows related. I work with enterprise customers every day and outside of specialized environments using Terminals, -ix development tools or SunRays the vast majority of what I see (on the resource side) is Microsoft Windows based solutions.
Virtual Desktops
1.) Shared Hosted Virtual Desktops - Ability to deliver WinServer desktop hosted within a datacenter to multiple remote users (think Terminal Services full desktop)
2.) Hosted Virtual Desktops - Ability to delivery WinXP/Vista/7 desktops (either virtual or physical) hosted within a datacenter to remote user (think typical "VDI")
3.) Local Virtual Desktops - Ability to delivery and manage a virtual desktop to a remote device that is useable online. (think local VM or on-demand streamed image)
4.) Offline/Mobile Virtual Desktops - Ability to deliver and manage a desktop to a remote device that is useable offline. (think local VM that synchronizes when online)
Virtual Applications
1.) Shared Hosted Applications - Ability to delivery WInServer based applications within a datacenter to multiple remote users (think Terminal Services published applications)
2.) Streamed Local Applications (Online) - Ability to package and deliver an application to remote client without need to install for online use
3.) Streamed Local Applications (Offline) - Ability to package and delivery an application to remote client without need to install for both online and offline use
Client Devices
1.) Traditional Fat Clients - typical client device, usually running Windows, MacOS or a flavor of Linux
2.) Thin Clients - stripped down client device typically running an embedded version of WIndows or a free Linux varient
3.) Zero Clients - special class of thin clients with no data at rest and little to no configuration (definition varies by vendor and customer)
4.) Traditional Laptops - same as traditional fat client but on a laptop
5.) Thin Client Laptops - same as thin client but on a laptop
6.) Mobile Devices - Smartphones, iOS devices, Android tablets
Types of Workers
1.) Task Workers - mundane repetetive tasks. Typically only interact with a couple applications (think data entry or call center)
2.) Knowledge Workers - tasks may require interaction with more applications and advanced functionality (think analsyst or office manager)
3.) Power Users - job funtion requires advanced hardware or software (think developer or artist or 3D designer)
4.) Mobile Users - job function requires being useful while disconnected.
The problem with "VDI" as understood by most people and how it is portrayed in the media (and many vendors) is that it is a one size fits all panecea that will reduce ROI and solve every problem your workers ever expereinced while making them more productive at the same time. This is not true. To further complicate the issue many people pick an item or two from each of the lists I presented above and try to figure out why their understanding of VDI will solve (or not solve) their issues and ignore everything else based on their stake in the discussion.
Now to address the statements in the original article (and Brian Madden's observations):
- I work from one of 4 devices. 1.) An Android based smartphone, 2.) A laptop running Citrix XenClient hosting multiple virtual desktops with multiple operating systems, 3.) A Macbook Air and 4.) My home computer running Win7 x64.
- When I need to work with internal corporate resources I will typically launch a corporate virtual desk
Ok, I am really, really amazed at how much FUD surrounds this. Most of the downsides to all of this are MS and Citrix licensing. Where I work, I maintain a small army of linux thin/fat clients (5000+) stations.
The reason for the "thin/fat" designation -- we once ran true thin client with the CPU load on the server -- but with modern hardware this became pointless with a fast network. So our latest generation of client are more of a network HDD. Everything run locally, and there is no HDD in the box.
The main benefits:
Cheap -- computer are less than $200 each.
FAST -- with 1-2 Gig of ram and a large preloaded cache the server disk IO is much greater than a standard desktop HDD.
And the BIGGIE -- the computer can be changed out like a toaster -- no local data, so a computer failure usually means replace the hardware (cheap) and turn back on with all the user data intact.
Network outages are rare and very quickly dealt with, and even then a user can login anywhere and get back to work. With server level virtual desktop, the user can remote in and get there full desktop (even with workstation off) over dial up speeds.
Want to update software on 5000+ workstations -- this can be done over morning coffee.
We easily run 300 workstation from 1 server, with the biggest limitation right now being HDD speed (just a 4 drive array).
So, for a site with 300 workstations -- we have 1 server (4 CPU cores, fast network, small disk array), and a whole bunch of $200 workstations (yes, we run CAD, 3D rendering with render farm, and other heavy apps). Cheap, fast, reliable, easy to maintain, full remote managment).
We even remotely turn on and off the workstations, and get alerts at 7:00 am if anything is not working to have it fixed before people start showing up for work.
$0 in licensing costs.
Before anyone gives me the whole -- you can't run that much off 1 server -- I have 30 sites currently in production that can show you otherwise.
1) mainframes, terminals
2) minicomputers, dumb terminals (VT52/VT100/etc.)
2.5) personal computers (PCs = laptop/desktop with "powerful" CPU and "lots" of local storage for both applications and data)
3) servers (cheaper minicomputer?), PCs (from above), later thin clients (PCs without local storage)
3.5) virtualized server (minicomputer or mainframe hosting servers), PCs, thin clients (netbooks, iPads, Android/Chome devices, WinCE/Mobile, etc.), Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI, {{reducing need for local storage}}
4) cloud (mainframe) via server, PCs, web operating systems, netbook, VDI, Android/Chrome {{device usage limited without Internet connection}}
4.5) "InterCloud", replace cabling with sub-standard RF communication and return to the mainframe beginning (1)
----
Hey I just published my new $1 App on iTunes that was free on Fred Fish 20 years ago and did more. {{psych}}
"the people selling VDI -- use traditional 'fat' notebooks"
How does this statement even make sense? Who would want their portable notebook computer to have to be connected to a network to work at all?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/27/sysadmin_wyse_thin_client/
Cheers!
PS: they Wyse openSUSE friendly ones.
http://www.wyse.com/thincomputing/index.asp
http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/index.asp
See? This is nice:
http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/thinclients/R50LE/index.asp
I use ssh.
I have been working in a virtualized dev environment for 6months + .
Its awful.
Recently had a horrendous performance problem (performance has always been poor).
Instead of this effecting one developer it was effecting 50+ people.
The "thin" client are really mini -pcs that churn out heat, overhead and die frequently.
I dont know who over committed the servers are but the cpu are over taxed . Memory is not a problem.
Deploy a company wide application and you might find that on plain old desktops - fine, but on the virtual, it behaves badly and basically messes up the virtualized server (think network you have a massive single point that is having its local set of NIC being hammered).
I am quite surprised to see that everyone in the comments is so focused on full VDI, without mentioning seamless integration.
I think that the distinction between local applications and remote (or "cloud") applications is becoming more and more blurred.
Both NX and Xpra allow for seamless applications that integrate very well with any existing desktop.
It's always easier to get people to evolve and develop new ways of working rather than asking them to switch everything to VDI from day one!
There are lots of good comments in this thread about security implications. Like any other technology, it may not be applicable everywhere, and security is certainly something that becomes a major issue once access to applications and their data becomes much easier to move around. Security considerations vary, and in a lot of business LANs you will find that ease of use and integration will be well ahead of security concerns (and rightly so - that's not being slack, just pragmatic).
I am totally biased on this issue as I am the author of:
http://winswitch.org/
Which makes it easier to run seamless apps (NX, Xpra, VNC or RDP - or even full VDI desktop) and move them from one client to another. And I am also a contributor to Xpra. After having worked for quite a while on full NX desktops... (/end of totally shameless plug)
I think these are exciting times for virtualisation of all sorts: system virtualization to single app seamless mode and everything in between.
TODO: 753) write sig.
We have both where I work and it breaks down into what they're going to be using it for.
If you're setting up a training center and you want an utterly locked down environment, thin clients make tons of sense. Reception desk, security desk, cleaning staff time card sign in kiosk? All great uses of thin clients.
Developers, sysadmin, dbas? Thin clients quickly run out of gas.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
You have an important point, but maybe this can be tackled with staged gains. The whole Windows Lock is a multiplex thing.
In a thread about thin clients, then give everyone Linux deskops and use a remote terminal login to ThatWindowsApp.
To grow a base of support for any activity, there needs to be a pyramid effect. Right now Linux is stuck in the corner of "way out there". If 60% of business users would actually use the alternatives to Office, so that the only remaining sticking point is TWA, then the perception mood begins to shift. That's how we did it with browsers, to make IE have to prove itself against the quad of Firefox-Safari-Chrome-Opera.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Seriously, I'd be very interested in this too.
I use VMware View at work and all my work bookmarks and internal tools are in it. Yes I am using a fat laptop at work and a desktop at home but wherever I go I can use that work environment exactly as I left it and pickup exactly where I left off where as before I had a pre built VM at home for all my tools and it had to constantly be updated to keep up. This has made working from home or being on call on the weekends much easier for me.
The Citrix networks i've seen are usually those of healthcare providers. They have many remote locations and got sold citrix massively, because it lowered IT costs and some of the more archaic applications required it for multi-user support. Also they bought citrix with the idea that they wouldn't have to replace their client hardware, which would be expensive - just upgrade the server.
Next thing that happened - large monitors became inexpensive, and many applications moved from archaic grey windows interfaces to webinterfaces. Suddenly the thin clients need replacement, because people want larger monitors and the old ones don't support high resolutions. And the network needs upgrading, because people want larger monitors. And the networks needs even more upgrading, because running a webbrowser over Citrix just is very very inefficient.
Of course, there's no budget for that - why would there be, the salesmen said they never would have to replace their clients and networks anymore - at least not in the next 10 years! There's only budget for upgrading the servers.
So, in the end, everyone's using a lousy thin client with a too small monitor that performs horribly because the network is too slow to use web applications.
This loss in productivity costs a lot more money than hiring a few good system administrators that support people with PC's or Macs.
VDI is a terrible acronym, I'll give you that.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
With any modern management system why would you ever go to the client, 99% of it is done remotely. I manage 10,000 desktops in 100 locations globally without leaving my desk using Altiris, SCCM or LANDESK type system. Service packs, patches, etc no issue all done with check boxes and occasional notification emails and a little bit of local testing/ limited production testing. You still need a hard disk on most VDI clients, ram is dirt cheap. OS upgrades are almost a non issue as well. We can deploy a desktop in 40 different languages in about an hour. We tried to look at VDI and with our good management system we currently have in place we could see zero cost savings if anything in some ways they would go up. In most companies 50% or more of your users are on laptops travel heavily and we KNOW internet connections suck in most of their locations VDI makes sense in some places but not most. The only places we could somewhat justify it were in our plants and kiosks. For everywhere else there is a good systems management software. It has its place but everytime we talk to someone about VDI we get the secret little nod that it wouldnt save us money. If you dont have a good management system it may help your business immensely but if you do its really really hard to find that cost savings they promise.
I'm quite happy doing dev work on my SunRay thin clients (with Solaris server on the backend).
Latency is always underestimated. I currently work on monster company that does all its development on hosted linux machines, so you basically have to use ssh+ some remote desktop (NX, VNC, whatever).
This works fine if you are within a millisecond to the datacenter, but I'm currently ~200ms from it, and I tell you it sucks! Is almost unbearable. It so bad, that you get distracted while waiting for the screen to update.
The worst part, is that most of the developers are in similar situations, sometimes worsened by limited bandwidth.
Mission Security is part of reality. Mission Performance is part of actuality.
Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest C*Os and IT tunnel vision savants know that everything is solved by more security and more security makes IT admin/management a plush-position for Luddites.
You can plan the best "ToDo" fantasy reality, but actuality means you "CAN" or "CANNOT" do.
Org/Ops that focus on security are always reactive, never proactive; hence, mission failure is assured.
The mission needs your folks: What do your folks need to do the job? How do you provide security?
The mission always dictates, C*Os/GOs cannot afford to be Security-Losers/Fools.
DO NOT allow security to mitigate mission performance!
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Citrix creates an environment that is incredibly hard to screw up for users, and by users the growing portion of the people who walk in the door that do not have a firm grasp of how to use the start button. The kind of people who take their laptops home and the second they are out from behind your security device they mysteriously get viruses. If you know what you are doing it's a hassle, but from a help desk/administrator perspective it is a God of uniformity and user mucking resilience. As far as "Thin Client" hardware, why spend $400 for something with 1/10th of the capability for $50 less than a bare bones desktop? What if you change your mind or infrastructure? Try to catch that screwball. You can GPO and do some very simple configurations to make a regular desktop the rough equivalent of a thin client.
Not disagreeing with you. In my particular case it was mapmaker pro and MS access.
But even in Word processing, linux doesn't cut it. Open Office is clunky and slow, and has limited documentation. Abiword is faster, but had some odd bugs. (Why do non-standard page sizes print with only half the text on the frame -- or just print blank. I spent a day on this. Gave up, and redid it in Word.) Don't get me started on the problems using the Excel wannabees.
I use linux. A lot. Linux or Freebsd is my first choice for servers. I run my windows under virtual box. Linux provides much of the security. I do all my email, all my web browsing on the linux side. All my file downloading.
But to write anything -- done on the windows side, saving my files to the linux side's samba file server.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Using thin clients in an enterprise or small to medium business environment gives you a lot of benefits to the long term bottom line. From a security perspective, you cut the "attack surface" of your network very sharply - from dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of desktops that each need antivirus, security updates, administration, and security monitoring, down to a handful of servers that you can lock down pretty tightly. From a support perspective, you are no longer managing all those desktops, you are now managing a handful of servers.
BULLSHIT From that statement alone I can only surmise that you have never ever worked in IT, the client is ALWAYS part of the equation, a thin client still has firmware and connectivity issues. Not to mention that rolling out any sort of network upgrade goes from being a minor project, to a critical time sensitive operation. Furthermore there is some benefit to having the infrastructure distributed, if your central server fails (and it will) then you're entire company can continue to work locally while you repair or rebuild.
Now, once you've gotten your THICK client computer, running your THIN client setup (wait... is it Windows 7? Is that thin client possible? Or is it "thin" client possible?).
Technically with Windows 7 enterprise you can set up a client to boot from a VHD (I have seen this implemented as this is how Windows deployment services works), and in-fact to use network licenses of software(office etc.) however I've never actually seen this implemented. That said you could in theory go for a medium client? if that is a term? where the software is run locally but is based on network licenses. Personally I wouldn't want to try it, but that's me
Any and all content posted above may be ignored, considered irrelevant, or otherwise dismissed.
Real thin clients (as with LTSP) are awesome and pretty much gives you all the benefit of thin clients and fat client combined; it even allows access to local hardware which allows you to run 3D graphics, use local sound, USB disks etc without having to do some weird protocol hacks. These days it's even aware of remote apps so if you choose to open a PDF in your web browser running as a local app you can have it open it on a remote server if you want to. If your 'thin client' is powerful enough you can also choose to run everything locally, essentially making it a fat client that just uses the network as a filesystem. This isn't particularly useful for systems like laptops, but for libraries, schools, etc that wish to minimise maintenance and support, it's awesome. Also, "thin client" doesn't imply VDI, and fat and thin client infrastructure aren't mutually exclusive, there are tons of configuration managers out there that allows you to easily keep your fat client and application servers running the way you want to. In most environments it's probably a good idea to have a mixture of both.
Think patches, service packs, O/S upgrades, memory upgrades, HD replacements, etc.
With the VMWare VDI we're trying to implement, we're hitting a wall with patching the actual VMWare components on the virtual images. There's no way to to perform the task without recomposing the parent, meaning anything we didn't allow the user to put on the highly space-restricted profile partition is lost. Our primary obstacle is the requirements our users have to install their own wide variety of local applications without having to sequence each one of hundreds or even thousands of required software titles.
I've actually done a fair bit of research on the subject and concluded that VDI's are a good solution in standard office environments after testing it out on actual equipment. Where VDI's fail are in any graphics / video or multimedia intensive environments where it isn't possible to transport enough data to the Terminals for it to work correctly on most gigabit networks. An extremely inexpensive solution is to use Oracle's VirtualBox along with the RDP support. Then buy set-top atom boxes and configure them with Linux as thin clients. It's pretty amazing to see an Atom set-top box running Linux Xwindows that automatically starts Rdesktop off an SD card. If you use the VirtualBox's customized version of Rdesktop you can get remote USB as well. Oh and be sure to use SSD drives on your Virtualization server. Your may have a massive multicore CPU but most folks forget to account that HD's and even Raid systems can't easily handle commands from a large group of clients. Even then I would highly suggest you do your research before even attempting such a project because there are small driver instabilities in VirtualBox for example that can cause issues if you misconfigure them which will crash the entire server. The reason why it hasn't been implemented yet? I suspect that's because most IT will not spend the months to research and test as I have. Plus many organizations are resistant to change in computing models.
"Developers won't generally use them ... as with so may computer related things these days, VDI is not about usefulness, it's about control. It makes it easy to lock employees down to a standard desktop, and provision or restore them with minimal effort. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not really aimed at developers." - by Nerdfest (867930) on Tuesday December 28, @06:57PM (#34693090)
Per my subject-line above, exactly & agreed, 110%, here: I've been working on CITRIX systems (& Windows Terminal Server (TS) too) since 1996 (for Bell South Cellular during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta Ga. USA), & they're GREAT for exactly what you note: Absolute control. This was during my tenure as a network tech/administrator. You simply setup a shared desktop, with apps groups need to use, & you're off running with complete control (no rogue apps installed possible etc.).
HOWEVER: As a developer on these systems, later on in 1998-2000, I didn't use the systems themselves on CITRIX until time for testing came into play... here? Here you found out there ARE CONCERNS you have to account for as a developer on CITRIX or TS, & that's when your multiple clients start accessing data from databases at the same time thru the same single TS/Citrix session...
(Yes - There are "hacks" for it, "Citrix/TS side" in the server's registry, to help with SOME of the "congestion" that results, but the best solution is to place "sleep" API calls into your loops for data access...)
The reason I state that, is because on one such project (doing access of sales data for 100 local campus salespeople, & 100 or so remote factory workers who were working on product for sale (some of which was ready for sale once it passed a certain level of testing in 12 steps (around step 10-11 it was considered OK for sale if all tests passed ok)))?
The remote campus terminals, going thru Citrix, started "locking up"...
The company was ready to kill the project, after nearly a million dollars had been sunk into it (couldn't have that, it'd be a year of my life wasted & no good for the resume either)...
So, I began looking at the behavior of the system itself during said lockups... & it was ONLY on the remote clients travelling thru Citrix... not the local campus systems (not on Citrix).
While my fellow dev. & I were "sweating bullets", I looked at HOW we were "timeslicing" in our loops... we were using Visual Basic 6.0 & Oracle OO40 (writes to DB) + MS ADO (reads from DB) for database access. OO40, Oracle's middleware, was for write of data back to the DB. It was faster than ADO for that. We used ADO for reads from the database (was faster than OO40 for reads).
We put in "DoEvents" timeslice calls into the loops for recordset returns, to no avail...
I looked thru the Win32 API, & saw the "sleep" API call & tried it... it worked!
(The reason we "theorized" this works, is because all of the remote clients are actually travelling thru 1 SINGLE CITRIX SESSION, & the DB middleware is NOT built for timeslicing, but rather, for speed... this caused that "congestion" & the sleep API call solves it (oddly, because DoEvents? It too uses the sleep API call, but it wouldn't work - we were told that DoEvents timeslices to THE APP ITSELF INTERNALLY ONLY, for message queue processing... Sleep forces the system to cede back time to the REST OF THE SYSTEM (which was what the problem was, due to the middleware's design))).
We went from 100% CPU usage on a SINGLE CITRIX SESSION, down to 2-4%, depending on the user...
APK
P.S.=> Just some "food for thought" on this topic for developers around this technology... this one, can save your behind! apk
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1916240&cid=34612834
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1916240&cid=34647708
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1922942&cid=34665368
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1924664&cid=34669668
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1916240&cid=34612834
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1916240&cid=34647708
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1922942&cid=34665368
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1924664&cid=34669668
ROTFLMAO! I wouldn't listen to "professor hairyfeet" guys, he's only an ITT Tech student.
Yea, right! That Assange guy can tell you a story or two about Amazon...
Yes School District 73 uses virtual machines - on diskless clients. The clients behave exactly the same as fat clients except / and /home are mounted over the network (nfs). We even get some speed improvements due to nfs caching the files the diskless clients need in RAM reducing disk-io/seek-time type on the client machines. We can run vmplayer or virtualbox on the diskless client to give access to additinal virtual machines on the thin client. Anything you do on the server is immediately available on the diskless clients. Full-system off-site backup for every computer in the school is a snap with diskless clients. Diskless also provides 3d acceleration, audio/video viewing/editing etc. Our largest school is running 280 diskless clients off of one server. Students & staff also have FreeNX access to their desktops from any web browser anywhere.
We use a combination of XenApp and virtualized desktops here. If you really look at the total cost of ownership, thin clients and virtualized desktops (or Citrix) is actually less expensive. The cost of a real (fat) workstation is about the same a thin client + terminal services client access license + citrix/vdi license. The difference is how much you save not having to manage all those physical devices. Spending hours imaging workstations over a WAN or the shipping costs back and forth. Not to mention skipping a hardware refresh because your 6 year old thin clients still work great. This isn't only ITs time, this is the time you've got employees out of commission, waiting to get their PC up and running again. Also we can provide incredibly an identical experience remotely, over VPN from a home PC or laptop. And of course there's the security considerations. I work for a mid-sized healthcare company, and not storing ePHI locally on any of these machines dramatically reduces the amount of regulatory concerns we have regarding all those workstations scattered across all those sites. Also disaster recovery, not from the datacenter perspective, but from the remote site. We're in the southeast and battle hurricanes. Having a site know they can access their desktop from anywhere is an incredible peace of mind. And let's not even think about OS upgrades. Now you have to tie your OS upgrades to hardware upgrades. I mean really who takes working XP machines and upgrades to Windows 7? You don't. You either refresh desktops early or have to sit on your hands and wait for the next refresh while the entire business yells at you about being "way behind the technology curve" (even though they can never quite explain WHY they need that shiny new OS or Office Suite).
Me, personally, I can't move to a thin client fast enough. The new linux based HP thin clients we just bought (~$199-$290 depending on model) support dual monitors and every protocol you can imagine (Anything from ICA and Leostream to Xdmcp to VNC, etc, etc etc). I plan on replacing the two aging desktops under my desk (win7+fedora13 with synergy-plus) with a single, tiny, HP thin client. And the best part is I can just reattach to my desktops over VPN from the house or when I'm on vacation (haha) and pickup right where I left off. I don't like windows anymore than the next slashdot reader, but I have a lot of windows based tools I still have to use. It's like screen for graphical desktops.
...than it is political. Just TRY to tell your typical CxO that the only thing they need is a little bitty box tacked to the back of their monitor, rather than that platinum-plated status symbol squatting next to their desk.
Regards;
Depends on the developers. Sysadmins and DBAs you're wrong 95% of the time. I'm a sysadmin and I prefer using a virtualized windows desktop. It's right where I left it when I get home, and if a thin client fails I can be back up in the time it takes to walk to and from the storage room to get a new one. What type of tools does a sysadmin or DBA use that don't work well in a virtualized environment? Are you under some kind of misguided assumption that virtualized desktops perform poorly?
There's a special place in hell for people who communicate poorly and then act smug when others misunderstand them. (That's the nearest billion, not the nearest integer, jackass.)
How about a Fat client that has the utility of a Thin client? I have worked with a blade network from ClearCube where all of the "Desktops" are blades in a 2U rack backplane. Depending on your specific needs they support KVM Extension, RDP, PC-over-IP, PC-over-Ethernet and VDI. With PC-over-Ethernet they even support 4 Monitors at the desk utilizing an Nvidia Workstation graphics chipset. The backplane allows the admin to reroute each PC to a different location on the fly. Should one PC fail the automated backup restore feature makes a crashed HDD a minor inconvenience rather than a devastating event.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
The simple fact of the mater comes down to possession. And no, I'm not talking about the Exorcist. In a world where an ever increasing number of people and organizations, either legally or illegally, have access to YOUR data and information, this breaks the last vestige of a thing that the Gen Y and Zers are completely devoid of: A sense of privacy. It’s bad enough that deep packet inspection of your data is now legal, but by using a thin client not only is your information being broadcast, sniffed, inspected and filed (for fun or profit), but the physical media is also outside of your possession. There is nothing left in your possession! Going this route is tantamount to giving your wallet to a check-out clerk and saying, "Just reach in there and pull out a twenty. Oh, and by the way, just keep my wallet until the next time I’m here. I’m sure you’re honest and nothing will happen to it in the mean time"
While I can see the benefit of many new and exciting technologies, we must not underestimate the ways that these conveniences can be abused or at what potential cost to our personal freedoms and privacy they come. Never forget the first paradigm of security. Security isn't convenient and convenience ISN'T safe.
We have about 150 terminals in about 12 offices that are used by folks to access email, print, and the Internet. Previously all of those were under our MS EA - so all had full versions of windows on them and we were paying a desktop license and SA on each one. But we also have terminal server CALs for everyone for other apps.. so we went "hey, wait a second..". Now we have 150 Ubuntu terminals that on login go straight to the terminal server(s) in fullscreen thanks to rdesktop via .xsession. They have no idea what's happening because it's actually faster this way because most of the terminals were old P4's, and most were infected with something or other half the time. The TS is locked down tight, lots of filtering + flashblock + firefox = win.
Granted we still have a ton of "fat" desktops, but for right now this saves us a ton of money and is much, much, much easier to support. We'll likely need to up our bandwidth in some spots, but that's a lot less cash than the MS licensing.
A few years ago I was given the task of creating a remote desktop environment for some contractors working with us. We used VNC (pretty popular). However, when the contractors went back to their home country (China), the solution failed miserably. The protocol was not fast or reliable enough.
We opted to switch to FreeNX (nomachine's GPL'd protocol).
It worked.
I then moved my entire desktop to the same scenario, where it has lived since about openSUSE 10.3 (I'm now at openSUSE 11.3).
I access my Windows boxes via rdp from my FreeNX'd openSUSE desktop. If Linux is your lightweight client, then the NX client resizes nicely and allows me to access my desktop from anywhere using just about any resolution and size of device (Windows isn't quite as forgiving... just fyi).
What DOESN'T work? Multimedia. And it sorta makes sense. Since what you have is a viewport into your remote desktop handling the complexities of variable bandwidth and latency (esp. WAN) is too difficult in general. So, for multimedia use, I recommend that be handled by the front end client (which means you need adequate horsepower on the thin client for that... which .... because of the mobile movement, isn't hard nowadays).
What is NICE about a remote desktop style environment is that it is more secure since the data resides with the real desktop, which isn't on the end user device. Protocols like NX, do have ways of allowing printers and sound and such to work (with warning about sync of audio/video, see above)... so there ARE some solutions provided for a truly integrated desktop (albeit, lessening the security of the system at the same time).
VDI, in general, isn't JUST a remote desktop though. It's the idea of a work space where icons and applications, etc. could be "running" on different pieces of equipment "somewhere" else. So... I don't have a true "VDI" experience, but if you consider that I do use my remote desktop as the launch point to other platforms and that many of my X11 client applications come from "somewhere" else... then IMHO, it proves the idea out regardless.
Long term, we're heading this direction anyhow. Already, people are moving to things like Google (gmail, etc) for handling things. People are using Amazon's EC2 when they need temporary servers. People are using smart phones (without regards to personal security). So, one could argue that VDI in concept is already happening around us and the need for "full" computers isn't as interesting anymore. Of course, this also means the end of the traditional desktop OS.... (e.g. the end of Windows). A true VDI is a presentation... an attempt at integrating highly disparate applications... applications that could be running on any backend SERVER OS.
that starts on a logical fallacy.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Virtualization isn't a stepping stone to general purpose thin-client-everywhere computing. Virtualization in the enterprising and business space is a fact today and will be the only way to do business in the near future. For the user virtualization won't ever work this way. For the enterprise administrator it may be used as a way to cheaply reimage fat clients, but that's about it. Thin client computing is brittle and that's a fact which isn't changing soon. It's just too problematic to have your own personal computer be a VM running on a farm somewhere over a gigE link.
Where desktop users will see virtualization will be as a form of isolation. Think .app bundles of VMs + a single app, seamlessly integrated into the host OS so the user can't tell the difference. This is where VDI is going to show up for normal people. And, yes, it will be on a normal fat client!
I want my Cowboyneal
At work I have a wyse xenith thin client on my desk that I use with Xen Desktop 5 VDI. I use Xen desktop to launch VM templates that contain my development tools like perforce and visual studio. I really do not feel any difference between using my laptop or the thin client when I am on my desk. The only advantage I can see for the laptop is portability.
No
Using thin clients in an enterprise or small to medium business environment gives you a lot of benefits to the long term bottom line. From a security perspective, you cut the "attack surface" of your network very sharply - from dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of desktops that each need antivirus, security updates, administration, and security monitoring, down to a handful of servers that you can lock down pretty tightly. From a support perspective, you are no longer managing all those desktops, you are now managing a handful of servers.
BULLSHIT From that statement alone I can only surmise that you have never ever worked in IT, the client is ALWAYS part of the equation, a thin client still has firmware and connectivity issues....
I didnt write that - you're responding to the wrong person for that one. As I indicated, he wasn't actually correct, except in theory.
Now, once you've gotten your THICK client computer, running your THIN client setup (wait... is it Windows 7? Is that thin client possible? Or is it "thin" client possible?).
Technically with Windows 7 enterprise you can set up a client to boot from a VHD (I have seen this implemented as this is how Windows deployment services works), and in-fact to use network licenses of software(office etc.) however I've never actually seen this implemented. That said you could in theory go for a medium client? if that is a term? where the software is run locally but is based on network licenses. Personally I wouldn't want to try it, but that's me
Agreed. And thus the problems I tried pointing out. By the time you are done, you're either loading a very big VHD image, or still running the "big stuff" from locally installed copies. And picking the first is painfully slow even on gigabit ethernet. I haven't seen anything like this done (actually deployed that is... tried? yes... Used? No) since the "Windows XP days".
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Exactly! That's ALL accomplishable without thin clients. We used (where we didn't have thin client setups) full XP installs that were locked and maintained by "corporate", including updates, patches, etc. The machines would install them (and any new software) at night, restart and be ready the next morning. ALL the client systems were maintained by corporate except in rare instances, at which time, there were only a couple of us at any given store (if even that many) who were granted access to the boxes with sufficient privileges to do anything.
And that's why, thin or thick client, the same security and management aspects can still be done remotely from a central location. Which is yet another selling point AGAINST thin clients when it comes to any business with an IT department who knows how to implement such things.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
And this coming from poor wittle APK, also know as "the idiot HOPES file guy"? As in you HOPES that one of the 300,000+ constantly changing array of websites that are infected doesn't happen to be the one you visit today? Or that you HOPES that nobody notices after repeatedly being asked you have repeatedly FAILED to show even the tiniest shred of mathematical proof that your magical woobie can scale? That you HOPES nobody notices your only "proof" is anecdotes, often by your own sock puppets like Kingsjester?
If there is ANYONE that should be LOLing it is me, for pointing out there are still morons that believe 16Mb HOPES files can do anything but block ads since ad servers are...what do you call it...oh yeah STATIC, just like your HOPES file, but really you are just kinda pathetic. You're like the idiot that just keeps hanging onto that three years out of date copy of Norton, because he is just so damned sure it still works, only the Norton guy is actually better protected than you are, since it did used to work in the past 5 years.
So please, keep posting APK, I do so enjoy pointing out the total uber fail of your magical woobie so. I also personally consider it a public service to point people to solutions that actually work instead of relying on magical woobies and anecdotes. And of course bitch slapping your around is also quite fun! Oh and taking a page from your book from now on ALL responses will be THIS post, with only additions being more links to your various trolls and the people making fun of them, so everyone knows who they are dealing with. Have a nice day and be sure you hug your magical woobie...err I mean HOPES file!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1930156&cid=34719276
LMAO!
You quoted John Lennon (whose song doesn't seem to me to have much bearing on the current question, but whatever):
"Some may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not..."
You left out some important words. A fuller quote is:
"Some may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one..."
Comparing the shorter and longer quote changes the meaning significantly, from claiming your are not a dreamer to admitting you are a dreamer but are one among many dreamers.
For submitting an apparently intentionally misleading quote, you fail.
"...If I could just have a small device that acts as a real dumb terminal with some processing power and minimal storage, I'd be happy..." The product you talk of exists. You are describing the SunRay ULTRA thin client. It weighs 0.4kg and uses 4 Watt. Size of a VHS cassette. It has no OS, no RAM, no CPU. Everything is done on the server. No processing is done on the SunRay ultra thin client, no software is run on the SunRay ultra thin client (hence the name "ultra thin" instead of thin client). It can not be upgraded. Instead you upgrade the server with more RAM or CPU. SunRay is similar to a VNC connection. They are routinely used over internet to servers in other countries. It needs 50KB/sec bandwidth. Perfect for development, but bad for streaming video because bitmap pictures are streamed to the SunRay client. The server software can be run on Linux or Solaris. Free to download and try. Buy an old SunRay client on Ebay for 40USD and try it. Or, instead you can use the SunRay soft client, which is a program that emulates a SunRay client (similar to VNC). All software is downloadable for free from Oracle. One server cpu core can drive 5 heavy office users, but you need RAM to each user. If you have one 8 core cpu, it would suffice to 40 heavy office users. SunRay differs from ordinary thin clients, which typically have 256MB RAM and 1GHz CPU and an embedded OS (WindowsCE, Linux) which you must patch and upgrade. In effect, a thin client is a very very weak PC that is useless for heavy compiling. But SunRay does everything on the server, it has no CPU of it's own that runs software (it only displays bitmaps that the server are sending to the client).