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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.
> 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?
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.
Attempt to fill in IT service request to replace switch. Realise need computer to do that. Pick up phone, but forgotten how to use. Wander hallways seeking IT support monkey. Monkeys elusive, cunning, always escape behind cubicle. Finally corner one, demand support. Monkey needs key to server room but IT manager must authorise taking key off hook. IT manager away doing Six Sigma Course. Monkey suggest fill in IT service request. Escape into air duct.
Reality of corporate environment not always match SLA. Rogerborg sad, but must speak truth, even if delivered in cursive.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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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Furthermore, queue... dick-measuring about how an hour of downtime for 16 users is totally unacceptable in "the enterprise" and how my users need five nines uptime, (even though all they do is play minesweeper and write reports). Insinuate anyone who would tolerate more than a minute a decade of switch downtime is a homeless, shoeless, neckbearded GNU/hippie. Quote federal regulations about reliability for nuclear reactor primary safety systems, vaguely hint that the stuff my users are working on is just as important/dangerous (it isn't; it's reports and minesweeper, but this is slashdot and appearances must be maintained). Cast aspersions upon the qualifications of anyone who thinks thin clients are reliable despite the crippling switch failure issue.
0 1 - just my two bits
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.