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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.
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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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.
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> 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?
Having used some actual thin clients, it's not bad, though I wouldn't want to game on it.
I think the core point would be that because of the way licensing works - you have to buy the client, pay for a license for the client, a license for all software used on the client(if you're going to be legal), it ends up actually being more expensive than a bottom line, but still capable full PC.
The HD adds, what, $20-40? The licenses for our thin clients was more like $100.
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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.
I'm not sure what you worked on and when, but with native virtualization instructions in modern processors, there is no noticable speed difference, the biggest place where people see issues is with disk contention with a badly designed storage platform behind the virtualization solution.
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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.
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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?
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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.
Another problem is buying the thin clients themselves. I can't remember off the top of my head, but the price difference between a client and a new workstation is barely enough to offset the difference in licensing, not to mention user complaints on performance. We toyed with the idea of retrofitting older workstations but supposedly we'd miss out on VMWare's/Teradici's proprietary PCoIP protocol. When it comes down to it, it's cheaper for us to buy more RAM and replace parts as needed on our existing workstations than purchase the needed infrastructure and thin clients to even begin replacing our workstations. I have begun giving some of our secretaries (or whatever the PC term is this week) older workstations with Debian with few complaints and more than one compliment on performance, however our GIS and admins will always need Windows and a beefy graphics card.
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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?
For banks, I think that probably ought to be required. Industries like that and places that need to tighten control of the data love VDI, as it makes it a lot harder for somebody to gain access or more worryingly leave secure data on an insecure machine.
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.
How does the iPad get around the problem of over saturated hotel networks or poor 3G connectivity? What does it bring to the table that isn't the same as a thin client on a laptop? That's right, it doesn't and nothing.
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.
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 studied this issue in the early 00's. The company I worked for had delayed buying any new client hardware to the point where we had administrative users on nine-year-old Dells and AutoCAD users on five-year-old machines. So of course we needed to buy new machines for everyone, and we wanted to find the cheapest solution. Well, management wanted the cheapest solution; users wanted to get some work done, rather than waiting until lunch time for their computer to log in.
In our case, including licensing and server upgrades (which were minor, because we had excess server capacity due to a shrinking company), it would have been cheaper to use a thin client system--but only for the administrative users. AutoCAD was not supported in a thin client environment (is it, even today?), and our service technicians absolutely hated using Citrix to access the ERP system. (Logging into the west coast from China, Germany, or even the midwest was ridiculous, waiting half a minute for your cursor to move across the screen.)
I finally managed to convince my boss, who loved the thin client concept, that because of remote users and AutoCAD users, it was best for us to kill off our Citrix system altogether. The power users got fast new workstations, the administrative users got shiny new PCs, our server room was leaned out and less prone to overheating, and everyone lived happily ever after--until the company folded 18 months later due to incompetent management.
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Why not just use a server? Amazon EC2 will rent you a "micro instance" Win2003/2008 server for 3 cents/hour ($21.60/month) or an Ubuntu server for 2 cents/hour ($14.40/month) plus a few bucks for storage.
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
Just don't do anything I/O or bandwidth intensive since you also pay for I/O and bandwidth.
You're not answering the question. Regardless of whether it's a PC, a notebook, a netbook, a tablet, a smartphone or a CPU up your uncle's ass, the fact of the matter is that poor and oversaturated network connections like you will inevitably find in a hotel room or public WiFi is going to mean very slow screen updates, slow cursor and keyboard updates, and so on. Using a fucking touchscreen doesn't magically cure these problems. It's not like an iPad has some magical faster network connection.
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I've done contract work for one of the major credit card companies as a data analyst, and they require us to go through Citrix clients (among other hoops) for a very simple reason: security. There is no way for us to perform an end-run around all of their security for the simple fact that they control our environments, tools, everything. It doesn't matter what kind of system we have (Windows, Mac, Linux, bottom-of-the-line laptop or ass-kicking Alienware), we're limited by the environment that they set up for us.
They could easily pay triple what it's costing them, as long as their security measures are in place, that's what matters most.
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The concept there is you transform previous thick clients into thin clients (basically rip out all the drives and network boot off the servers). You can take 10 year old desktops that are limping along on decade old OS and programs that don't fit on there anymore and run them from the central server with more horsepower. Then you're not buying new thin clients.
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 $275 Zotacs(Mag HD-ND01-U) running Ubuntu 10.04. I developed a disk image with everything the way we want it. It takes me 10 minutes to set up a new machine and most of that is the unboxing part. Clients authenticate via LDAP and mount NFS homes via autofs. Some apps are local such as Firefox and Thunderbird. Other business apps are accessed via A XenApp/Citrix server using the Citrix Native Linux client. And then there are the HR and Finance SAAS applications. Now the clients could just offer a RDP connection application and the Citrix server could be a server providing virtual desktops. But why? It would add a few more layers of complexity with little benefit. The client machines are cheap, fast, easy to replace. The OS is free. The user gets the performance of silicon on the desk with the storage reliability of a server in the closet.
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There is so much FUD in this topic. M$ 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.
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Well aren't you a special little snowflake.
Guess what? You aren't everyone. If everyone had the same needs you do, software companies - catering to the domain needs of people, companies, conglomerates, municipalities, and governments - wouldn't exist.
Just a couple things which open source won't (doesn't) do (well/sufficiently):
* CRM, particularly for specific domains
* Human accounting
* healthcare
* Legal/trial workings
* Drafting, rendering, and animation (still one of the only domains exclusively populated by 'real' desktops running Windows)
* Pretty much any and all retail establishments which want to track merchandise
As a result, we've got software which runs only on Windows. Isn't it interesting how supply and demand works?
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Why does EVERY FOSS guy think it is about Windows and Office? Hint: It is NEVER about Windows and Office, it is about all those funky ass "mission critical" apps that do not run on Linux full stop. From the charting and accounting software, to the payroll apps, damned near everything in most business will NOT run on Linux, and a good 80% of them I'd say have NO equivalent on Linux.
Just saying to a corporate customer "Just use Linux" is about like walking up to a graphic designer and saying "You don't need that pesky Photoshop, it isn't free as in freedom! here enjoy the Gimp". Try it and see how well it goes over. It is NEVER Windows or Office, those are easy. There are a bazillion other niche apps won't run on Linux, would cost a buttload of money to have a custom version made for Linux, and that is even if you can get the data out easily. Hint: Often you can't. Nearly every SMB and SOHO in my area relies on Quickbooks. What is there even close? GNUCash? It is about as close as Gimp is to Photoshop.
So in conclusion while I'm sure it'd be nice for Linux adoption if all people did at work was use a browser or make documents, but that is rarely the case. It is all those OTHER apps that are used every single day that bite you in the ass, NOT Windows and Office.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
That is why we are piloting a VDI deployment this year. I work at a community college and we are rolling out thin clients using a combo of VMWare, Unidesk, and Panologic. What we were drawn to was how easy it was to control what applications the user gets, patching the desktop and applications, improving security, faster recovery times if there is a software issue (like a virus that slips past), and lastly because we have kiosk computers, being able to have non-persistant desktops (This will save us a little money as it replaces software like deep freeze).
We are in a unique situation however where we need to give users access to multiple operating systems and applications on a given hour. In the past we would need to build our physical machine's bigger then normal so they could handle windows XP + a virtual machine for windows vista or 7. For about the same cost of the PC hardware we would have purchased for the number of PC's we selected for piloting I was able to purchase the server, software licenses, and thin clients needed to do the accomplish the same task. Our hope is that we can save soft costs when it comes to managing these computers and that the thin clients will last longer then a typical PC refresh and saving us cash in the long run (as you pointed out).
Other features that weighed on our decision was how easy it was to recover a dead machine and being able to leverage de-duplication. Currently, if our CFO's dell computer died, we would need to retrieve his computer, recover his files, image a new computer (providing a suitable computer was in stock), install any custom applications he requires, and finally place his data back where it belongs (providing whatever died is not in stock to replace). Ideally all of his data would have been backed up on the network, but being a typically user he probably saved to other locations as well (And being someone like a CFO, you can't give him the usual 'you should have done it like we told you' speech). If the thin client dies, it is literally just a walk to his office and a swap of the device. If he can't wait that long he could just go to any other thin client and log in to get his desktop. Further more, UPS devices at the desktops are no longer required. If the power goes out, the desktops are still running in our datacenter with it's own generator.
Our back-end storage has de-duplication. This combined with the cloning technology unidesk leverages has us with 25 desktops deployed and only 60 gigs of storage used. While user data will increase that amount as the system is used, we could have 1 or 100 desktop and would still only store 1 copy of the OS and 1 copy of each application installed. The savings can be significant.
We are also hoping that the thin clients will ease our way into windows 7. As a college we are constantly being pushed by students, outside companies, and our own faculty to be technologically current. There has been a huge push for us to start moving to windows 7. Unfortunately, there are still many applications that are not supported on windows 7 that some staff members require. There is also course material (some certification tests) that have not yet updated their material for windows 7. Using this system we will be able to offer both XP or Win7 at any location where there is a thin client. So if you run into a document that doesn't work right in office 2007/2010 you can quickly 'reboot' into XP and office 2003 and get your job done while you wait for the author of the document to update it. This comes at a great time because a lot of our computers are at the end of their life cycle and would not meet the requirements to run windows 7. We can provide them with a thin client with XP and all their apps, then slowly rollout windows 7 allowing them a transition period where both systems are available to them.
We know that VDI won't be the solution to all of our problems. There will always been users with notebook computers, classes that require high end video cards or lots of ram (3d modeling, etc), and other situ