Thin Client Uses

[ahuxham]

....and you have to introduce a Sun Server, as a gateway, to the Windows environment, and that needs to ideally be duplicated - else it is a single point of failure for all the terminals. It seems this point is sometimes glossed over when the cost of Sunrays are discussed....?

How much does this server cost...?

I think I did mention that ESX or ESXI are involved and Linux / Solaris for the software, therefore two servers.

It's always going to be a single point of failure unless you have redundancy in place for both SRSS and ESX. Same can be said for all solutions to be honest. Needless to say I've found my own way around this.

1 x Server for Solaris, (Server cost £1600) (1 x Quad @2.53GHZ, 8GB ram, 1 x 500GB 15k SAS)
1 x Server for VMWARE, (Server cost £2800) (2 x Quad(s) @2.53GHZ, 16GB ram, 8GB per proc, 2 x 500GB 15k SAS) Self specced for the purpose. Lets not forget no Educational discount as I no longer work in the field. (both servers are Sun)

Our VMware server is backed up to SAN nightly, I've created scripts to shutdown the machines at night, back everything up, than reboot the server, and the server is configured to start the machines in order when its started from reboot, all machines are up at 7AM ready for play.

The VMware server has our Solaris OS containing SRSS P2V'd and left as shutdown, the second the server fails I'll start the VM, assosciate a resource pool to it, and the problems resolved.

If our VMWARE server fails, I'll install ESX on it, which takes all of 15-20minutes and restore the backed up data and switch the Solaris VM on.

Interchangeability between the two servers gives me enough freedom to not worry about HA.

[sacabonos]

1 x Server for Solaris, (Server cost £1600) (1 x Quad @2.53GHZ, 8GB ram, 1 x 500GB 15k SAS)
1 x Server for VMWARE, (Server cost £2800) (2 x Quad(s) @2.53GHZ, 16GB ram, 8GB per proc, 2 x 500GB 15k SAS) Self specced for the purpose. Lets not forget no Educational discount as I no longer work in the field. (both servers are Sun)

How many thin clients do you have running with this kind of setup?

[ahuxham]

How many thin clients do you have running with this kind of setup?

Around 45 XP machines running Virtualized and 40 Thin Clients.

[linescanner]

....and you have to introduce a Sun Server, as a gateway, to the Windows environment, and that needs to ideally be duplicated - else it is a single point of failure for all the terminals. It seems this point is sometimes glossed over when the cost of Sunrays are discussed....?

How much does this server cost...?

The server costs depend on the size of the deployment. As Sun Ray is not a Thin Client, the control and power is at the server side. Yes this does add a layer over and above normal Thin(Medium) Clients, but it gives you a whole heap of cool stuff that you can do with Sun Ray and SGD.

Sun Ray against Thin Client is not an Apples for Apples comparison.

[linescanner]

Around 45 XP machines running Virtualized and 40 Thin Clients.

Virtualised Solaris for Sun Ray works fine for small deployments like this. It does however not scale too well unless you run lots of small Solaris instances. If the deployment is into the 100+ range would recommend physical tin for the Sun Ray servers.