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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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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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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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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?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.