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.

Comments

No, he's not

[zn0k]

> 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?

Re:Performance

[cratermoon]

The licensing costs end up being the key issue in companies of any size. By the time they set up and license all their people with client machines and all the applications, a company will spend about as much as just buying PCs in bulk from Dell or whoever and site licensing the corporate-standard MS Office suite. Pile on top of that the various fiddly things about virtual desktops that just don't work like having a real desktop PC raising the support costs and it's not competitive.

The central server with dumb terminals era ended long ago, except in niche applications. Desktops and laptops that a capable enough are just too cheap and standardized desktop support contracts from third-party support operations pretty much rule the budget considerations. For virtual and really thin clients to take off, the licensing would have to be notably cheaper and support for the edge cases like traveling remote access would have to be much better.

It may be old school but it works

[emeitner]

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.