Thin Clients in a Computer Lab Environment?

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."

Silly question

[Lxy]

The obvious anser is right here [linuxdoc.org]. That is assuming of course that linux is a viable answer. If you're talking Windows thin client (I hope you're not, since you did post this to /.) Citrix is your only real option.

Get reference sites

[larien]

Ask Citrix to give you a list of other sites where they have implemented their software successfully and visit them. Ask the local administrators (and users!) how they find it.

However, make sure that it's a site similar to the one you are on; no point getting a business as a reference site for a uni.

Finally, if things don't go as planned post-implementation, point out to Citrix that you are educating the future decision makers of the world; if they perceive that Citrix is crap, they won't buy it in years to come. That should get them to help fix your problems!

Sun Sunrays

[Metrollica]

Sunrays [sun.com] from Sun [sun.com] are the best and most popular choice. They have been deployed in many areas in the US and out including Canada and Europe.

Not great for a lab

[neurojab]

I don't think putting these machines in a lab is a good idea. Here's why: The cost savings is supposed to come from cheaper administration and the idea that thin clients aren't outdated as fast as thick clients. The sad truth is that thin clients are outdated FASTER than thick clients. If you take your 486 PC, you can run linux and a WinFrames client, you've got a system for the ages ;) But what if you've got a SUN NC? Good luck trying to find a good use for that. What are you going to do three years from now when the speed is no longer acceptable? What's your upgrade path?

With your "thin client" solution, you're paying a lot of money for low-speed hardware, so why not by cheap standard hardware instead and go with thin-client software?

SunRays!

[boopus]

I got to Cal(UC berkeley) and we have a couple labs full of SunRays, which I have found great from a user perspective. Now, the thing you're not going to beleive is why. The sunrays are silent. You never notice how loud the fans from forty computers in a lab are untill you walk into one that's quiet. It's much easier to think for long periods of time. The labs are about 50/50 divided between unix pc's and sunrays, and I'll only work on the PC's if I have to, though the (computer desktop) environment is identical.

There are some disadvantages with sharing a Big Computer with a lot of people, but overall the plusses seem to outweigh the minuses. Last year about halfway through the semester the workload increased on the servers and everything slowed down... This was the bad part. The good part was that a month later, they added another server, switched a number of the clients over to it, and everything jumped back up to speed. If these had been PC's that weren't cutting it any more they would have had to be replaced.

I have no idea what they've gone through on the administrative level, or if Sun gives us a good deal or not. They deployed a new lab last year, so they must not hate them...

Simultanious WHOMP in the classroom

[seawall]

Thin clients can be a wonderful tool but a classroom often violates a basic working assumption: that people won't all whomp on the server and network at the exact same moment.

Consider: 20 students, 1 server. The instructor says: All right, let's all open Autocad (or some other heavyweight app with big datasets) now.

Depending how the lab is used this may not be an issue. Teacher awareness can mitigate the problem somewhat.

Use minimal installs of managed clients instead

[iankerickson]

There's no reason to use thin clients anymore, unless you already have a multiuser host that's going to waste or you can afford to buy 1 to 3 EXPENSIVE, high-power servers every few years to keep the performance of the back-end up.

PCs are cheap. Software can automate all the administration issues of caring for dozens to hundred of seats. A lot of the software is free. Managed PCs are much cheaper, and if you aggressively audit and prune the files installed on them (i.e. delete all the files that aren't absolutely required to use the PC's applications) then the file system becomes very light and you'll be surprise how much faster the PC performs. (O'Reily has a good book on Optimizing Windows 95 for Games -- ignore the title, rip off the cover if you have to bring it to work -- it has the info you need)

Look at revrdist for Macs and PCRDist for Windows. They automatically syncronize all the files and registry entries of the client to a master image (with rule sets for exceptions/iterations). You could hack something similiar together with boot floppies or rebooting the PC off the network (password protect the BIOS) and reimage the hard drive from scripts on a file server. I ran across a page on the net about someone who already did this with a linux file server, but the

Also look at http://www.infrastructures.org for UNIX-only take on the same idea as revrdist.

Once you do this, you get the best of both worlds: the zero-administration of thin clients and the local performance of fat clients. This also places a minimal load on your file servers (except when you reimage the whole lab!) because you can easily cache all the apps, files, and libs students will need on the local disk.

It's common knowledge modern OSes are complete bloatware. It's not common knowledge that you can par down the OS and apps to a bare minimum of files using an imaging file server. On a standalone PC, if you remove too many files, you can paint yourself into a corner that requires a reinstall or rescue disk/floppy to fix. With an imaging server, you can experiment by moving files out of their directories on the server, rebooting the client, and then running a few experiments or scripts to verify it all works. If it doesn't, put the files back and reboot the client again until you figure it out.

Thin Clients are hip because they're easy to sell. You can't really sell the above methodology in a shrink-wrapped box -- you have to hire and pay somebody knowledgable to do it, which makes it a hard-sell of a panacea.

In different perspective

[jsse]

I'm sure the orginal poster is expecting answers like "Linux is the way" when raising such question in /.? :)

As we can see the major problems lie in the budget cut. I've been working for University and we all face the problem of huge budget being spent on licence fees on every single client.

Most software vendor like Microsoft and Symantec charge per seat/per user license, thin client could save the amount spent on hardware, which is a fixed cost and very marginal. The recurrent cost spent on license fee takes a big part of the budget.

What I want to say is, thin client is not the answer to budget problem. If they really have the will to solve the problem then do not buy more license then necessary. Seeking the relative low cost alternatives(I don't need to give examples do I? :)

It's hard, consider the expected opposition from non-technical department like Marketing and Business school(while I could easily get CS students use OpenOffice, even LateX!). Limited access to software with 'per seat/user license' is a recommendation. Just like AutoCAD, only those who really need it shall have access to this software.

Say, OK, you Business students can have access to Microsoft Word, but the license fees spent will be charged to your department; just like CS pays for C++, Accounting pays for DacEasy, fair enough.

However, reality is reality, those lazy dinosaur in U would rather spending more money then doing things in different way. Oh well...

Printing problems due to config errors?

[Doctor High]

1. 
   We use Citrix extensively in our enterprise WAN, and for a while we were having the problem you describe of print jobs mysteriously appearing at any one of our 25 sites across 10 counties. Turned out that we had two problems with our setup.
   
2. First, we had many users sharing their logins with other users, which meant that there were sometimes up to eight users logged from different workstations under the same username. When they printed, Citrix got confused and sent the print jobs to any one of the potentially eight different default printers of the eight people logged in under that username. Once that problem was corrected, we found our second problem...
3. We were imaging our workstations for fast and easy rollout, with the Citrix client pre-installed. Unfortunately, the Citrix client stores the Windows workstation's NetBIOS name in an .ini file on the local hard drive, and once the .ini file has been created, the Citrix client app never bothers to check and see if the Windows workstation's name has changed. So we had hundreds of workstations with the same NetBIOS name recorded in the Citrix client's .ini file! What a nightmare... So we started clearing the contents of that file at every logon, and now all of our Citrix printing works really smoothly.

Citrix vs. Terminal Server

[codefreez]

I wouldn't reccommend citrix for a computer lab environment, especially a large one, even with many servers.

Where I work we recently deployed citrix, but for a relatively small number of users. We have a dual athalon with 4GB ram. I personally think the cost is out of control, and performance isn't what Metafram would have you believe.

But, if you already have windows machines, it's not worth it to use Citrix. Why? MS Terminal server. The only reason you really need Citrix is if you want clients for any platform. From what I am told, Bandwidth usage ends up being close wether you use Citrix ICA or not. And you have to pay for overpriced TSCALs either way.

Keep your Windows machines and run the Terminal Server client on them if you're forced to go that route. A real machine is going to be better for anything that needs processor power. Matlab or Photoshop on a terminal server? Forget it.

Advice on Citrix from the experienced CCA

[q-soe]

Same for us - we run a large environment which has to encompass a lot of remote sites and we have been running citrix metaframe 1.8 and now Xp with NT and 2000 terminal server. We use WYSE thin client boxes and they are good value, invredibly reliable and the newer ones have a customised windows CE configuration - you dont even need to have an ip for the server you can configure for a domain and load balance the farm as we do, the first available server (we run 18 load balanced) picks up the client connection and runs with it - if you get your links up to a decent speed this is an option but if not (in the case of remote sites) i adivse setting them to connect to a specific server and then if thats not availble they will choose another - this cuts down on profile copying between boxes (citrix is heavily profile based - stored on the home server of the user).

Publishing APPS is extremely simple and is easier than Windows Terminal Server - this solution is not the best and citrix offers advantages over it.

The things to be aware of / cons
1. Bandwidth - citrix claim 32kb is used by each full delivered client - dont believe them if your users use large databases or financial sofwtare - aim for an overhead of at least half this again and spec the link accordingly x number of users and add an extra 10% - i run 10 people over a 320k link which can be slow under heavy load - increasing this to 384k seemed to give me better performance and 512k made it very fast.
2. User issues - the clients will piss users of if they have had PC's - they have NO cd roms, no floppy drives and the things you can do on a normal PC (like installing software) cannot be done on metaframe - it's a very secure solution and if you are smart and want to lower support you will lock down the desktop and scrensavers and set the default screen res to 1024x768 - this is what we have found to be best, when a user logs into my farm they get a blank screen with no icons and a limited programs selection in the start menu - all of their applications are delivered in a program neighbourhood window. also lock the size of caches and internet files down to a minimum size - long login times are often related to large internet caches.

Users do like it once they get used to it and from a support view the thing is great full remote control built in means you can see instantly what a user is doing, the admin tools are fantastic and support is a cinch. All drives and printers are simply login script homed (we use Kixstart but are moving to an active directory domain so thats changing) and file perissions and access to application farms are as simple as configuring domain groups.

Once you get it worked out its worth the considerable cost, run a license gateway and you dont need overtly large licenses - a license not in use on one server can be used by another and by using load balancing a fault tolerance can be built in (a session will be terminated is a server goes down but a user can log straight back into another)

I liked it so much that even though im the manager i got my CCA (citrix Certified Administrator) and im working on my CCEA (Citrix Certified Enterprise Administrator) if youre looking for a cert which offers returns on investment the CCEA is it but YOU MUST be a REAL mcse as it needs a pretyy deep knowledge base (Paper MCSE should not bother)

Citrix is used heavily in University environmments (i know of 6 here in australia alone) so check it out at them.

PS a note - The downside to citrix is it needs MEATY server - i buy Quad Xeon's with 2.5gb ram and 80gb raids for them - it needs it.