Thin Clients in a Computer Lab Environment? 377
chachi8 asks: "I work as a lab administrator in a university, and I currently look after about 500 Windows-based PCs spread out over 20 locations. The IT administration at my school has recently (and quite suddenly) decided that thin clients are a direction we should be pursuing, and I've been doing some research over the past few weeks. We've recently been visited by representatives of Citrix who basically showed us some really impressive software that is far from cheap. Because we're a university facing budget cuts, cost is a major issue for us, so what I'm interested in knowing is whether anyone has implemented a thin-client solution in a computer lab environment, and whether it turned out to be cost effective over a 3-5 year timeframe. Clearly, the idea of being able to add an extra few years to the lives of our lab PCs is very attractive, as is the thought of being able to centrally administer the software in all of our labs, but I'm as yet unclear as to whether the costs of servers and licensing (and everything else) will really result in a long-term savings in money."
K12Linux LTSP (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely phenomenal. We installed it today and will be deploying it in a lab environment soon.
Not a SINGLE problem in install or setup.
VNC does NOT provide this (Score:2, Informative)
How about Linux Terminal Server Project (Score:2, Informative)
Thin Clients - University Lab Style (Score:5, Informative)
Thin clients are not good for labs (Score:5, Informative)
Um, might wanna rethink that decision... (Score:4, Informative)
Weeeeeee. Oh yeah, and some apps simply will not run. WordPerfect2000 and some others come to mind.
Cheers,
LV
tarantella (Score:2, Informative)
My experiences (Score:5, Informative)
Having a central Windows machine and thin clients for each of the users was a horrendous mistake. Whole labs spent as much time non-functional as they spent functional. Even having users change their passwords was problematic. Now, this was a few years back now and things may have improved. However, the only way I'd consider this is if the company you are buying the hardware from will guarantee uptime. This should be at least 99.9% uptime (and yes, this includes security patches and hardware failures), otherwise you are going to get crucified.
On the other hand, the computing science department also maintains several labs running OpenBSD [openbsd.org] for the client operating system. A student can log in to any computer in any lab because the /home directories are exported (over NFS, I think, but I could be wrong) from central file servers. The default software is installed locally so things can run very quickly but a large amount of additional software is also installed on central file servers and exported out to all the machines.
That setup is not bulletproof but the uptime is measured in weeks or months rather than hours or days. Depending on the year, it probably approaches 99.9% uptime. It also has the nice advantage of almost all of the software being entirely free.
So which should you go with? From my experience (ymmv), the clearly superior technical solution is to run OpenBSD on a large number of semi-thin client Intel machines. This is far more reliable than a competing Windows solution. From a cost perspective, there's really no comparison. That said, this assumes that you can migrate over to a Unix style environment. Not everyone can. Do not forget that you'd be throwing out all your Windows software using this solution. Also, you require sysadmins who are familiar with Unix. I assume this is the case.
Depends on what you use your labs for... (Score:5, Informative)
Citrix... (Score:3, Informative)
What I'd suggest is either since you are already using Windows get a Windows Terminal Server and use RDP. Just this week I used a RDP client for Linux, and it worked flawlessly (www.rdpdesktop.org), so client OS won't really matter all that much with a Terminal Server.
Alternately, you could get a nice Linux/UNIX server and run remote X sessions.
Either solution requires a competent Administrator, and a beefy server, but both are probably cheaper than Citrix's Metaframe (or whatever it was called) software.
Citrix works great for us (Score:2, Informative)
I don't administer the actual server, but from my understanding, certain groups are setup to see different applications: developers might see whatever development tools they use, remote sales folks see whatever tools they use, etc. Other things (access to Windows Explorer, the "Run" dialog box, etc. can also be locked down).
My experience thus far has been a very positive one. It's been a relatively quick connection as well, especially considering the distance. Unfortunately, as I didn't set the system up, I can't really provide anymore information than what I've said so far.
In terms of having longer lives for the current lab PCs, I figure as long as they can still run the Citrix client, there shouldn't be any problems.
Re:Citrix in a school environment (Score:1, Informative)
We also run Citrix over our wireless lan and DSL connections.
The Jr/Sr HS is the center of everything. We have an 11Mbs wan connection to the middle school, and a 900K dsl line to the elementary. The elementary only uses citrix in the office though.
My advice though is hire someone to come in and implement it. Ofter people do it themselves and royally make it suck!
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Take a look at Tarantella (Score:3, Informative)
It works great using a webbrowser or the native client.
By using RSA securid I have been able to securely deploy both windows and unix applications to users on the internet. There are native clients available for windows, linux and Solaris
The big advantage is that you only need a windows terminal server for your windows applications. By moving as many applications as possible to Linux you can save a lot of money.
Regards Kenneth
Count ALL your costs (Score:5, Informative)
Get a spreadsheet of the current cost of doing business vs. the solutions you are looking at so you can show it to mgt.
I think, however, that getting away from a PC/Windows based system is the correct solution. Gartner Group once published a study stating that the cost of supporting a PC based network was up to $10k/yr in some situations. Sure the software *looks* expensive up front, but over 3-5 years moving to thin clents would probably be a great idea.
But run the numbers first, get competing companies and their products in the door and let them make their best presentation. Make sure they know you are looking at 3 to 5 year costs, not just initial purchases, because PC/Windows always *looks* cheap when you do not factor in the add-ons and support.
Then decide.
inetd VNC [Re:VNC does NOT provide this] (Score:2, Informative)
Again, this would not be helpfull in the case of a Windows environment, but if you ever consider linux, this may be helpful to you.
citrix (Score:3, Informative)
first of all the recomended amount of memory per user is something like 16- 32 MB of ram per user ON THE SERVER, that means that if you want to support 500 users and if you only used to 16mb of memory per user then just to support the users you would need 8 GIGs of ram not to mention the 128 to GIG or ram for just running the OS, not to mention the price of the server that supports that much ram and the price of having between 4 and 8 Zeon procs and then the arrays you would need to store all of the information on that system, something like VNC or some other solution would be more evective, its hard to say what though, thats just my 2 cents
Jon
Re:Sun Sunrays (Score:2, Informative)
info sources (Score:2, Informative)
K12ltsp is based on www.ltsp.org [ltsp.org] which is in version 3.0 right now. I use this software to set up computer labs in non-profits in and around Portland. We are a NP ourselves [freegeek.org]) It is gaining maturity, system administration is barely more work than working on a box running programs locally. You need to have DHCP running on the server, TFTP setup, and allow it to serve applications to remote X-Clients, and that is about it.
Here are some links for further reading on what others have done.
umn [umn.edu]
olinux [olinux.com.br]
solucorp [solucorp.qc.ca]
askslashdot [slashdot.org]
gbdirect [gbdirect.co.uk]
tucows [tucows.com]
XDM [linuxdoc.org]
Re:SunRays! (Score:2, Informative)
They are brain dead easy to administrate (at least the latest version of the server software is), whats more if you stick a NT Terminal Server onto the network you can run the Citrix Solaris client very well from a SunRay terminal. This gives you the best of both worlds in most cases. You can even setup acounts to automaticly connect to the NT box when they log in.
Another great thing about the SunRay solution is the smart cards. Being able to stick my card into any terminal on the network and get my desktop as I last left it (with apps still running) is great.
Citrix is great (Score:2, Informative)
We use it at my work here in Germany, I have no idea of the cost of the central server program but the clients are free and they run great. I use it on Debian on they are uber speedy, all the rendering is down client side so the bandwidth needed is minimal. My only complaint is the way it handles animated gifs on webpages, they really slow the client down. But excel et.al. have no probs
One note though is that microsoft requires licenses for each machine(unique ip) that connects to there servers but apparently this only costs about 5 dollars per machine
IMHO: buy it
Re:X-Window System? (Score:3, Informative)
ltsp.sourceforge.net
Citrix and "thin" dont go together (Score:5, Informative)
My understanding is that the "thin client" is supposed to save in hardware costs, which it MIGHT. The software costs, however, can't be that much lower unless you use the Linux citrix client. You still have to pay your Microsoft tax for the OS, and then you need NT CALs, and licenses for Office (which I assume will be the major app used). I just don't see the benefit. Citrix is selling buzzwords and hype with terrible performance.
Universities have enough problems with bandwidth, imagine having to share all your applications over that pipe with all the mp3s and video traffic!
Ask your administration... (Score:2, Informative)
Thin Clients can be very useful in an environment, or they can be crap. The only time I've ever seen a sensible business case for thin clients is this:
A main office with several remote offices needing to run a bloatware database app that requires lots of data bandwidth. Typically the main office has good computers but the remote offices are staffed by 3 or 4 morons (i.e. nontechnical users) and they have PCs ranging from a new Presario w/WinXP the manager bought to a clone Pentium Pro running Windows 95. This is where Citrix shines -- they run the app on the Citrix server and a 56k modem can handle the screen updates on their end.
There's another place where Citrix is useful, and that is to web-demo your software. You publish the app, embedded in a web page, and tell your customer to go to http://demo.html. Then you shadow their session from the Citirx box, and you're both looking at the same screen, clicking the same icons, and so forth. This is a great way to demo a product and I'm surprised more companies don't do it. (That's what we use it for at work, it's very easy to set up too.)
That being said, I don't think a computer lab fits into either scenario too well. Maybe if you have low bandwidth links between the remote labs and the servers it would make sense, but why not spend your money on a better link? The licensing costs add up pretty quickly, although one thing to note is that Windows 2000 Pro (not sure about XP Pro) includes a Terminal Services CAL. The Citrix CALs are pricey, as is the citrix server itself. (last i checked about $3K for MetaFrame 1.8 w/15 CALs).
I haven't looked into this, but I think Windows 2000 Terminal Services have come a long way since NT4 TSE. I was reading just the other day that they can now publish an application in a web page using ASP, providing the same functionality as the Citrix web-demo I talked about above, for $3000 less. (Technically Citrix can do it using ASP or java, blah blah blah.)
A large portion of whether it's worth pursuing thin clients comes down to how old/disparate is the HW in your labs. If they are all PII 266s it might be worth looking at, however my computer at work is a dell PII 350 laptop and it's absolutely fine for running Win 2K and office xp. I have another user running Win XP, Office XP, and ACT (all resource hogs) on a PII 266 with 64MB RAM -- no complaints. Computers are so fast now that unless you really have junk, or junk from twenty different vendors, then you probably dont' need to upgrade them anyway within the next three to five years.
As for centrally managing software, that is a big plus. It's a nice benefit of Citrix but it's not the primary function. If managing apps is the reason for deploying thin clients, I'd look at something like SMS, which is a lot harder to set up but is much cheaper and addresses that problem specifically.
--Hey Taco, can I just send you $5 in the mail, and then block all the ads with proxomitron?
Re:Sun Sunrays (Score:2, Informative)
I have personally seen this setup with SunPCI cards installed w/NT+citrix. This allows everyone to run Windows apps as well as a solaris session. Put gnome on top and it's pretty nice. You can't ask for an easier to admin setup and the "session in pocket" with smart cards rules. Imagine working on a project in one lab, going to class in another building, then going to library, plugging in your card and getting back to work on your project right where you left off! Netscape, terminals, everything still open to exactly where you were. I kinda take this for granted at work now, but I remember being jazzed when I first saw it.
BTW: I believe the SunRays are leased as part of the whole package. If one breaks, you just plug another into the same spot. You can also dual head them real easy. Cool stuff if you like Solaris.
Been thin for years (Score:2, Informative)
When it works, it is great! I'd rather have a lab full of thin clients than a lab full of PCs running Windows. The ability to contol the computing environment, configure the software for everyone, quick updates...all just by working on the server. Not to mention the ability to upgrade the entire lab just by upgrading the server. The students knew that each "machine" in the lab would act the same - no surprises after logging in. NCD also provided us with a utility that allowed the NT servers to query our NIS+ server for account information, heck, it even allowed SAMBA to automatically mount their home directories.
But remember the application software - all these PC programmers are still thinking each user has their own machine - writing files to funny places, popping in registry keys in funny places, gobbling up memory, etc. Some apps don't play nice in the MS terminal server environment.
We also ran into issues with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and some stats packages - they would run, but far too slow to be useful. When we switched to Windows 2000 from the NT+Citrix mix the clients were limited to 256 colors. Too few to keep the map makers happy.
A different department on campus had a terrible experience with Citrix when using old PCs as the "thin client" but their problems seemed to stem from a lack of training for lab monitors and users that didn't understand the difference between running an app on the local desktop machine vs. logging into the central server. As we had Xterminals to start, then Windows Based Terminals (yuk) in our labs we didn't have that problem.
I ended up pulling the thin clients from the lab and installing new PCs but that was more a political decesion by our new Dean than a technical one. Now all our GA's and some staff have thin clients in on their desks where most use them for Email, MS Office, and web browsing - and they work just fine.
For non-demanding apps you may be okay, remember to double whatever specs Citrix gives you. Only use Citrix if you *have* to. If you must offer Windows apps to thin clients you may be able to use what is built into Windows 2000 w/o the Citrix add-ons. I have a low opinion of Citrix since getting caught in the middle of the licensing battles between them, Microsoft, and NCD. Held up my upgrades for over a year, removed loads of functionality from the product, cost lots more money. I was happy to leave Citrix behind.
I miss having the old Xterminals in the labs, heck, I even miss the NCD Thinstars in the labs, but we'll be setting up the PCs to dual boot...
Diskless booting tool... (Score:3, Informative)
If you are serious about thin (e.g "diskless") clients, take a look at bpbatch. It an interesting diskless boot loader.
http://www.bpbatch.org/ [bpbatch.org]
BpBatch is a versatile remote-boot processor, that can be downloaded for free from the Web. It can perform a large variety of actions on a computer at boot-time, before any operating system operation has started. Actions performed by BpBatch ranges from partitioning hard disk to authenticating users, including a graphical interface. The main feature of BpBatch is the partition cloning facility, which let you create an image of a computer's hard disk partition and then distribute and install this image on a cluster of PC.
Re:Silly question (Score:1, Informative)
About the only advantages I see of Citrix over the Win2k TS is the ability to restrict things, like having single 'published' applications, rather than an entire desktop. Citrix ICA also has less overhead than the protocol W2k TS uses, but both have far less than NT4 TS.
Just because you are a
there is a great book out there on Win NT/2k TS that I use all the time as a reference, but I forget the name, and I dont have it here with me. Check on amazon- it was the highest ranked terminal server book when I bought it.
If you are a Linux person, you should check into Linux TS's. I have read they are doing some good things.
Super MCSE- Everything but the cape
Best of both worlds (Score:5, Informative)
So, If i was doing this, this is how i would approach it:
1. you have to keep the cost of the thin clients under $250... thats without monitor. These need to be small, dependable, and easlily replaced. In other words, you should be able to walk into someones office, and unplug it, and plug in a new one, and they should be ready to go in under a min. if you have to do lots of configuration on the client side to get things working, then get a better thin client from another vendor. Make sure the thin client comes with something like a san disk or something you can overwrite. What you want to be able to do is run a *nix on it that can do remote X connections, or do rdp connections. forget about getting in bed with citrix, its way too much money, and you really dont get that much back. unless you use all the whiz bang features, and have lots of time to learn how to tie it all together.
2. Use a combination of windows terminal servers and *nix terminal servers. By default you want people to use the *nix servers, but their will be some folks who want or need to use windows apps, and letting them be able to do so, is a good thing. You can use rdesktop to let the thin client connect to the windows terminal server. it is a little slower than the native windows rdp client, or the citrix ica client, however its free, and it runs on *nixes. If you had to use the windows rdp client it would cost you a windows ce license at least, and to get the citrix client you would have to spring for the whole citrix package which gets expensive.
3. Get solid dual proc servers with as much ram as they can hold! dont skimp! get fast scsi drives, and try to squeeze it into a small footprint. If you can use the same hardware for both the *nix and windows terminal servers, that will be a plus, since you can shuffle them around incase of failure, or more demand for one kind than another.
4. cookie cut the systems. in other words, have it designed that you can get another server up and configured in under an hour. this way, incase you need to scale quickly, or have massive hardware failure, you have a system that can be brought back online asap.
5. stress test the hell out of your design before you go into production. nothing will be worse than realising down the road that you have a design flaw, and you have to scrap and rebuild stuff. that will piss the users off, your boss off, and probably get you fired. tune for performance, and plan to scale. it doesnt matter if you only have 500 users right now, if your design isnt good enough to scale up to 5000, or even 50000, go back to the drawing board and see where your bottleneck is. Why? cause that bottleneck may come back to bite you one day.
Sun Ray (Score:1, Informative)
I won't lie we had some problem at the begening, but overall the TCO is definitly lower then PC.
Those are preaty cool and are even easyier then citrix. The software cost is 0$, this is a huge saving (you have to be willing to quit office for star office). If you really need some windows app you can put citrix behind the sunrar servers and acces them on the sunrays.
Maybe not the solution for everyone but you definitly should look at it.
It depends upon your application (Score:2, Informative)
My wife was a regional sales rep for Citrix for several years. Citrix is good stuff with real benefits as described previously *if* your apps are not graphics/cpu intensive (i.e. MS
Word/Excel good; GIS mapping bad).
Also, Citrix themselves will not install/setup the installation; all of that is handled by the reseller. It is the quality of the reseller that almost completely determines the quality of the installation. Most good resellers will setup for you a 30-day demo with the apps you specify to give you the opportunity to evaluate whether or not your particular apps/usage is a good fit. Furthermore most good resellers are also proficient in both Citrix, RDP and other thin client setups.
My advice is to first do your background research on the reseller, remember there are many successfull thin-client deployement, but your particular reseller may not have done any! If your reseller is not open, talk to the Citrix rep-they should point your to one of there "platinum" level resellers.
Further- do not try to do the thin-client setup yourself whatever implementation you decide (citrix, rdp, linux, blah). Hire someone with experience.
Some clarifications:
* Citrix was founded by a group of very pro-unix folks. Their first software package was WinFrame which was actually a hacked version of WinNT 3.x. that added simulateous multi-user capabilities and the ICA protocol for remote sessions.
* Microsoft bought the multi-user extensions from Citrix and incorporated them into Win2K. This left Citrix with just the need for a simpler application to maintain which managed remote sessions over ICA- this is Metaframe and runs on top of Win2K Server.
* RDP is a lame ICA-workalike. RDP is not ICA. ICA does not run on RDP.
Also in the interest of full disclosure:
- My wife has been employed by both Microsoft and Citrix.
- My company (and myself) use citrix on a regular basis, in addition to Win2K.
- I develop software on Win2k and Solaris
- I believe everyone should be running MacOS X.
Use "fat but diskless" clients (Score:2, Informative)
They have a Linux/Solaris based storage virtualization product that would enable you to build fat but diskless clients. For Windows and Linux/Unix clients use a Fibre Channel or iSCSI card in the clients, and boot off a remote disk as if it were a locally attached SCSI drive. Linux/Unix clients can also be booted the old fashioned way (netboot, etherboot, etc) but why go through the trouble?
You get all the benefits of having local disks in the clients plus centralized backup and management like you get with thin clients. Example: Some user blew away his whole drive while playing with fdisk? At the central server just restore a recent backup, or copy over a standard disk image, and tell the user to reboot.
I've been using it for a while now and one cool feature is the ability to virtually swap boot "disks" for my machines where I used to physically swap boot disks mounted in removable carriers. I am also using it to share a single tape drive among 5 servers, using their SCSI over Ethernet implementation. It's almost like NAT sharing for SCSI devices.
I think Citrix would be good for this (Score:4, Informative)
Citrix is expensive, you need Citrix server licences, Citrix Connection Licences, Win2k server licences, Win2k CALs and Win2k Terminal Services CALs. Not cheap, I firgure I've spent about $600 CD per user on these alone. In the end this will save you money on admin time and headaches. The upfront costs are scary but the TCO is lower.
Thin clients are cool. I use NCD ThinStars [ncd.com]and I'm pretty happy with them. They run WinCE, have all the client software built in for Citrix and MS RDP, they remind me so much of the HP X term I used way back when I can't belive it sometimes. Keep in mind you won't have any removable media though.
The thing you have to do before even considering this is audit your software requirements. If you want to setup general use labs with Office and IE, you'll be fine. For a CS lab or an Eng lab where you have stuff like compilers and Matlab installed it just isn't gonna work.
Don't go cheap on the servers, when they go down you are hooped. Of the current bunch out there I like the Compaqs the best, figure on dual proc P3s (Xeons are overkill for this) with 1 to 2 GB RAM and RAID 1 or 5. The boost you get from having a RAID adapter with a big cache is huge when compared to a SCSI system. This server will handle out 25 or 30 people depending on thier usage.
If your software requirements are compatable with the concept I think you should really take a look at it. TCO is much lower, if Office breaks you have to fix it on a few servers, IE uber patches installed a few times, much easier than 100 desktops, belive me. I have two friends that started out with me in the same company 8 years ago and now we are all Citrix admins in different places. All of us have the same opinion, if you have to run a Windows network, this is the way to do it. One of them is the admin for a Citrix reference client.
The only warning I have for you is to be damn careful about the software you deploy. When you have a shared sytem anything can drop the whole boat for you. Be damn careful of HP printer drivers some of the LaserJet drivers will crash you, all of the Deskjet drivers will cause you problems.
Check out these sites for info:
www.thethin.net [thethin.net]
www.thinplanet.com [thinplanet.com]
And read these books:
Windows NT/2000 Thin Client Solutions [amazon.com]
Citrix: MetaFrame for Windows Terminal Services: The Official Guide [amazon.com]
If you have any other questions feel free to email me : electric-monk(at)cadvision.com
Re:K12Linux LTSP (Score:2, Informative)
The whole point of having computers in school is so that people can get computer skills and fit into a society that has ever climbing computer literacy demands.
Most people would think that learning linux is an advantage. You seem to think of it as an ism that would stunt a child's development. This is quite disturbing. The probem I have with it is the implication that someone who starts off with a cryptic operating system, will never be able to fit into a highlevel computer world filled with business logic.
There are many successful microsoft users who started off with Amiga, Commodores and Trs 80s and these people are quite successful despite the fact that their former platforms had cult like followings.
I'm sure that most would agree that the more oses you can work with, the better prepared you are to deal with tomorrow's challenges.
Lighten up!!
Linux and BSD are fun OSes. They can teach a student how to think. They are not the only answer, but they are a great help.
Linux certainly isn't the child corrupting form of substance abuse that you think it is. As long as people are learning something from it, what could possibly be wrong?
Even if you could get other people to agree with you, how do you propose banning linux?
Maybe we could have another prohibition?
Maybe we could have a linux user's age?
Wouldn't that be funny! - Having to show id to download redhat!:)
Some useful articles, and a bit of advice (Score:2, Informative)
This one relates the story of a government's thin client deployment in the state of florida:
I happen to be an administrator of a SunRay network, and can offer the following advice: if you decide to go with thin clients, don't cut any corners on your networking hardware. Get gigE, and quality switches. You want as much bandwidth as possible going into your server. A couple of users streaming video will cause everyone's thin-client workstation to slow down considerably, unless your pipes are wide enough to handle it.
Cheers
Re:Thin Clients - University Lab Style (Score:4, Informative)
From Experience.. (Score:2, Informative)
First, Citrix is a great product, but the costs don't justify unless you're using it fully. Citrix's new server product called MetaFrame XP comes in three different flavors: XPs, for a single server implementation, XPa, for a load balanced environment, and XPe, the load balanced environment with all the bells and whistles.
Costs that are required are as such:
1. You're going to have to have Windows 2000 Client Access Licenses for everyone that will hit the Windows 2000 server[s] running Terminal Services.
2. You're going to have to have Windows 2000 Terminal Server Client Access Licneses for every box that will hit the Windows 2000 server[s] running Terminal Services. Keep in mind, though, that a Windows 2000 Professional PC comes with a TS CAL. So, no need to purchase a TS CAL for any Windows 2000 Professional PC that will connect.
3. You're going to have to buy Connection Licenses for each
4. If you purchase your Citrix Licenses with Subscription Advantage, which allows you free Feature Release upgrades, there's an additional cost per license.
Euducation environments get price breaks on their licenses, so, its not as bad as it could be.
If you're looking for a locked-down environment, with some manageability, look at Windows 2000 with Terminal Services instead of adding Citrix. With Windows 2000 Group Policy's you can lock down virtual desktop sessions really well and provide that secure, load balanced thin-client solution. You can find some thin-client linux based devices for under $300. Check out the following for a nice device with RDP built in: http://www.neoware.com/products/capio/5xx.html
Power consumption is another factor not looked at by many. Gartner did a study that found, on average, thin clients to consume up to 7x less power per PC. This comes at quite a savings if you factor in all the PCs in your environment during the year.
One last thing to help you figure out cost savings. Citrix has a tool you can use to get some rough numbers to view projected savings. Check out the following link to the ACE Cost Analyzer: http://acecostanalyzer.com/
Citrix products are used in 99% of the Fortune 100 and 90% of the Fortune 500. The product works, and works well, when someone knowledgeable can help out with the solution. Im not saying that the product is perfect, but many problems (such as printing, etc) can be avoided or minimized with help.
Good luck,
pini0n
More K12 Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Assess your needs first. What kind of computer lab? What will the students be doing there? Is connectivity with MS apps/OS a requirement? What type of budget do you have for the changeover? What are your current and forecasted staffings for this lab?
There are many "LTSP" posts, and I think that's great, because I administer 45 machines set up this way at my language lab in a Thai university, but it may or may not be for you. We require some Windows programs that were pruchased before I came on, so we use a Win2000 terminal server and the rdesktop program.
It all works beautifully, but do NOT be confused by some of the posts below, because sound IS NOT supported on terminal server. The word from MS is maybe next generation (really makes you wish it was open source and you could just add it in, no?).
I researched this for about four months, and, in the end, we went with K12LTSP, which is preconfigured for LTSP using auto DHCP on RH 7.2 with all sorts of difficult to set up issues already resolved (including sound). It includes a lot of extra software like openoffice, and you can just pop in a RH7.2 disk to get the development stuff you will probably need. It is an awesome piece of work, and I heartily recommend it.
As I said, start with evaluating your needs before locking yourself into a solution that may cause you more headaches than individual machines.
Dan
Re:Citrix... (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think so. Citrix makes a Metaframe Client for DOS. Definitely not a Windows client.
What you need is a license for a NT or 2000 desktop for each client, depending on which version of terminal services you're running. Even though the desktop OS is not installed on your terminal, you must have a license for the desktop OS.
Also, if you use terminal services from a device that IS running the appropriate OS, then you do not need an additional license for the OS to run a terminal window.
Plus you need a TS CAL and a File/Print (server) CAL.
Win2K Terminal Services is cheaper. (Score:3, Informative)
I admin for a company that does management for Medical Offices. We have several offices that run windows 2000 server with Terminal Services loaded. I have been very very happy with these sites.
We also have several sites that are running in a pure Windows 2000 network environment. (All Win2K CLient workstations, and servers.. nothing else) Either option is pretty close to the same cost. We use ternimal services in offices that have a lot of semi-decent hardware onsite or are planning on purchasing new computers. If a site has a bunch of skanky hardware sitting around then Terminal Server is the way to go.
Rememeber to audit your software before you consider this. EVERY SINGLE APPLICATION you want to use has to work under Terminal Services to get this to work. I built a server and test drove all my apps before I bid out the server. Lots and lots or RAM is a MUST to do Terminal Services, and I have two processors and RAID 5 in all my servers (Compaq Proliants).
The other great thing about Terminal Services is remote Administration. You get a free terminal access license with every Windows2000 server license for administrative purposes. I have a WAN link to all my servers and I can do 90% of my admin tasks from my office.... no more onsite.
I doubt a thin client option will be any cheaper unless you have a ton of skanky boxen with about 128MB of RAM and decent video cards, but TCO is borderline.
Stay away from Citrix unless you need its expanded capabilites (X-tra clients, some better mapping (serial ports and such), and some better file system stuff). Citrix is a buggy add-on that can be very expensive very quickly. For MS Office, Internet Explorer, Outlook and most basic Apps, Windows Terminal Services is probably adequate. Watch for License issues, we use an SCO terminal access client for accessing our SCO based Practice Management System that is a bit funky in the way it is licensed on a Terminal Server.
Good luck and if you want to see my whitepaper and TCO comparisons (3 2000 Sites) (3 Terminal Server Sites) with 18 months of installed base time, drop me an e-mail!
Re:Sun Sunrays (Score:3, Informative)
They aren't incredibly cheap compared to what you could build low-end PCs for these days. But not having to maintain many individual wintel machines might make up for the price.
Another thing to watch is that the sunrays need their own 100Mb switched network. (AKA the Sunray Interconnect Fabric. Thank you marketing.) If you have Sunray Enterprise Appliances (again, thanks) in many different buildings, this may be a problem, as they would need their own switch in each building. And each switch needs it's own connection to the server. This could be a problem if you don't have dark fiber/copper in the ground. I seem to remember that you can't use vlans for this. Check the info on sun.com.
One very good thing about this solution is the 5-year warranty. If an appliance dies, you call sun, get the new one in 2-3 days, swap it with the old one and you're going again. no fixing PCs.
They do sound, you can surf the web, read e-mail, and use StarOffice for your office apps which is all most students might need.
my $0.02
-BigT
Here's how to do it (Score:2, Informative)
1. Start off with the K12ltsp.org CDs - use the installation as a reference for setting up DHCP, TFTP, and other services on your own later.
2. Once you're comfortable with that, try a regular distro with the LTSP packages. They really are easy to install and require only minor tweaking to run properly.
3. I've had terrific success with old Dell Optiplex desktops, you can buy them on eBay all day long for under $100. The ones I use are P166 w/ 32MB ram, 2MB onboard video (enough for 16 bit 1024x768) and 3com 905 or Intel Pro/100 network cards. Unplug the HD and CDROM, you don't need them and the PC is virtually silent without them. Make a boot floppy from the rom-o-matic website and away you go.
4. Don't skimp and use 10Mb networking, spend a few extra bucks and get 100Mb switches. Not for the throughput, but rather the reduced latency. Not a huge difference, but when you figure that every pixel update, every mouse twitch, and every keystroke has to traverse the network the latency is noticable.
Once you see how incredibly easy a thin client network is to setup and manage, you'll never go back to fat workstations. Have fun!
Re:Citrix is great (Score:4, Informative)
That is incorrect. Each machine that ever connects to the server requires a Windows Server CAL, $40. It also requires a Terminal Services CAL, $135. So each seat costs $175. Each concurrent connection to the server requires a Citrix connect license, about $300-$400 depending on what flavour of Citrix.
So fully replacing a PC costs around $500, plus the cost of the terminal, plus the cost of the server. Now, standard educational discount can run up to 90%--of course, you can frequently get educational discount on the hardware as well. Don't forget that applications running on the server are also licensed per-seat. Can't just install one copy of Office and run the whole place.
Citrix is also a bit of PITA to administrate. It's doing a difficult thing, and doing it pretty well, but there are minor sniglets, especially if you're using the more advanced functionality. Short answer? Better have a good reason to use Citrix. If you have one, it'll work out; installing Citrix blind, however, leads to massive problems. We use it where I work as part of our suite of services, and it fills the niche we use it for very well. But I'm not about to ditch all the computers in the office for WinTerms.
Also never hurts to remember: The network is the load average.
Our experiences with Citrix and thin clients.... (Score:3, Informative)
So far, I've come to a few conclusions.
1. Be *very* cautious about deciding to serve an entire Windows desktop to the clients. There are unbelievable security/configuration headaches you'll encounter as time goes on. (Basically, what happens is a user can install a program while using the Citrix desktop. Even if he/she doesn't have the administrator rights that are required to succeed in installing the application to the Citrix server, it can still end up writing some changes to the system registry before it fails.) We've seen things like
2. Internet Explorer (or any web browser, for that matter) runs very poorly when served through a Citrix ICA session. It will work pretty well viewing a static HTML page, but things like Shockwave and Flash video will clobber the Citrix server's CPU and update very sluggishly on the client's system that's viewing it. Unfortunately, if you try getting around this by letting users run a locally installed browser instead, you can't easily handle things like their own personal sets of bookmarks/shortcuts, or cookies.
3. As others have already pointed out here, printing from inside Citrix is troublesome. We've had issues with print notifications going to the wrong user (never did get a decent explanation from Citrix on why this happens out the blue, every so often). More importantly, some printer drivers just refuse to work properly in a Citrix environment.
4. Avoid thin clients that come with "embedded NT" (NTE)! That's all we're using right now for thin clients (Netier XL1000 and XL2000's), and they're bad news. They take a LONG time to boot up, and they're too much like using a full-blown PC, minus the hard drive and cooling fans. Since they do still need the special "embedded" version of the OS, you have to pay the manufacturer's inflated prices to make you new OS images when you want to upgrade them. (They told me just to switch to embedded Linux on our Netiers, it would probably cost in the ballpark of $2000-2500 to have Wyse engineering work up a custom master image for us.) Then too, the "management software" they provide for most thins is less than stellar. At best, you get the exact same functionality you'd get using something like the latest verison of Symantec Ghost on your PCs (with the new Ghost Console). More often, you get a buggy system manager that requires learning yet another proprietary scripting language to push software updates to your thin clients.
Citrix servers, linux thin clients (thinknics) (Score:2, Informative)
At the local college here, we have 8 Citrix ICA servers (nice, dual proc 1ghz xeon, tons ram) running NT4.0 terminal server. Its a nice fit for the students/fac, and the NT shop that is ran here (we're working on changing it). We were buying a few of these WYSE winterms [wyse.com] to deploy across campus to allow access, but at over $800 a pop those things get expensive in a hurry.
So, in order to save money and provide loads more functionality, we bought a thinknic [thinknic.com] and i went about the process of hacking the hell out if it. there are tons of websites (hack-a-nic.com, [hack-a-nic.com] and yahoo's groups [yahoo.com] are just 2) that describe the in's and out's of this $199 piece of hardware.
all in all, they are pretty easy to hack. the standard OS is based of debian i believe, and runs 2.2.x (i forget). anyway, the window manager is blackbox and you can change the menus a bit to add right-click desktop functionality and turn off the always-on netscape session. I have ours with a custom background, and updated version of citrix, mozilla instead of netscape, and links to a telnet client and ssh. i also have one that i am testing that uses a PAM module to authenticate off of the NT domain so the user can open and run a couple of native apps like abiword and gnumeric and save their work to their NT network drive.
We now have about 25 of these things scattered across campus, and they work great. you could also use them to connect to a linux terminal server [ltsp.org] instead of windows. Next up for us is providing full X-terminal functionality to a couple of linux servers to provide remote application support. these are really nifty boxes.
Running win boxes in labs (Score:2, Informative)
The main problem being students messing up with the windows configurations and storing personal files created by the users, we came along with the following solution:
- Keep user homes on powerful UNIX servers.
- Install one Linux server in each lab hall (approx one Linux server for each 40-50 PC; a 300 MHz oldish PC with 64 M RAM and a few GB HDD perfectly does the job.
- NFS Mount various home trees on the main server(s) to these lab servers.
- Setup Lab servers to provide print spooling and print quota checks
- Setup lab servers with Samba server; make them domain controllers
- setup lab PCs to authenticate from lab servers. This is the worst part. NT, XP wont do this. Believe it or not, we have the best solution with Win95. Win98 also works, but any win beyond that simply doesnt work.
- Configure lab PCs to have access only to printer(s) in the same lab
- Use some incremental disk restoration program (PC-Rdist is a good one) so that when a student logs out, the Windows settings and any deleted files are restores; any new files added by teh user are cleaned up (except the home directories of course).
- Keep a Windows system disk image on each lab server so in case a machine fails beyond the repair capability of incremental restorer, you can restore a full image over the LAN.
Everybody is happy with the above configuration. The average up-time for PCs have increased to 98%. Access is limited to only students and staff (since a domain logon is enforced). Printer and disk quotas a re under control since these services are in fact provided by UNIX machines. Cookies and other personal information are removed from the pcs when somebody logs out.As far as general security audits are concerned, the net admin will have a log of who used which pc, when and for how long.
The cost is just the cost of an extra PC to be configured as lab server and since you dont need a hell of a peformance on these, any old PC can be used.
Using thin clients in Win env is a dream. The only solution in the markets seems to be Citrix but is certainly is NOT designed for lab environments. They expect users to load one or two applications into the RAM in the morning and use only them till they leave their offices.
A slight difference between Citrix and MSTerminal (Score:3, Informative)
The great thing about citrix is the range of clients available - i have as a test done an install on a 486SX16 notebook and dialed in - dos client only for dial in (configuration was a breeze) and then it runs a full Citrix Desktop - i have seen it done with 485 machines and i know of at least one company using P166 machines with slakware running a linux client for Full windows desktop - its a great cheap solution to dedicated thin terminals.
The thing about many other terminal server solutions is they need an os to run on top of - windows or otherwise - with citrix you can use terminals or i believe there is even a bootable floppy client for it so no internal harddrives are needed on older machinery.
Im told it will run on XT's but have never seen it done. This is one product that is worth the money.