Thin Client in a Primary School?

[Hamzah]

Morning all,
Advice needed please,we as a primary school we are looking to revamp our ict infrastructure, at the moment we have roughly around 130 odd workstations and 25 laptops .700 pupils and 90+ staff
We are thinking of going down the thin client route is it feasable?
Anyone know of a primary school that has implemented thin client? the pros the cons!
We would have the main class machines,ict suite and admin as fat clients and the rest thin clients, opinions mucho appreciated.

[SpuffMonkey]

I would suggest that it depends on what software you want to use - I find thin client is very good for "office" type applications and light internet use - not so good for heavy multimedia with sound etc. Low maintenance at the client end - more skills needed at the server end.

[localzuk]

We use thin clients for our 'everything else' machines now. All clusters in our year 5 and year 6 buildings are thin clients, and they do the job perfectly.

The important part is getting servers of suitable spec to be able to run the number of clients you want to run. Also, there are a few other options you could consider, such as VDI or application virtualisation.

[dhicks]

Anyone know of a primary school that has implemented thin client?

Us. We have a suite of 18 workstations running Edubuntu. I'll be upgrading that to 9.10 as soon as I can, and I'm planning some more installs in various classrooms around the school. I'm planning on setting up a small server in a classroom, with the screen output attached to a projector for front-of-class display, then half-a-dozen workstations running off the server. Setting up Ubuntu / Edubuntu as a thin client server is dead easy, you just plug it in and away it goes, although I've got a checklist somewhere of things you can sort out (VNC server, integration with Active Directory) that I should post.

--
David Hicks

[nut-ed]

Probably the first step is to decide if you want to build / support the thin client
environment yourself, or call in a reseller.

If you call in a reseller (pretty much any reseller should be able to install and setup a thin client environment) they will probably remove most of the further decisions and propose a solution.

If you want to do it yourself - to get started and get feel for what thin clients are all about:

Dig out an old XP PC.
Load a free demo version of something like "XP Unlimited"
Borrow a couple of thin clients from a tc manufacturer, they all offer demo units (or use another old PC and use its Windows RDP client, so the PC emulates a TC)

Connect it all up. This won't give a 100% accurate terminal server environment, but it would give you a pretty good feel of what it is all about without costing a penny....

[wrights]

Difficult to say if thin clients will work without knowing what software you're going to run, what are the plans? Tizzy's Tools?

I would definitely look at NComputing's X550 series devices if the computers will be sitting in small clusters.

[cookie_monster]

Originally when we started with Citrix we had a company in (Novus) to do some consulting, they’ve rolled out thin client setups in a number of schools. Allot of it I could of done myself but they have a long list of education apps that are a pain to get running and how to configure them and so on.
If you can do some of the labour intensive and time consuming tasks yourself it shouldn’t cost much and you’ll get expert assistance.