RDS in Primary Schools

[owen1978]

I doing my first tentative steps into research of going down the RDS 2008 route
for a Primary School.

In a year or two I want to do a full upgrade of the schools hardware and will be looking to;

upgrade approx 80 pc's to thin clients (Veering towards Axel clients)
virtualise the servers

My first question is how well does Thin Clients on RDS 2008 work with Promethean whiteboards?

Also as these thin clients don't have optical drives can I simply plug in a USB Optical drive when
they want to watch a dvd or play a cd?

[Axel]

Hi Owen1978

It's Matthew from Axel...

You may want to consider Windows Multipoint - it is essentially W2008/r2 but cut down and customised specifically for schools, and has in-build controls to easily let the teacher take control of individual or all the student's screens. (So maybe better suited for primary schools ?)
Microsoft have also lowered the cost - but I realise schools get very good MS pricing - so not sure how relevant this is.

There is a video of a terminal being setup to work with Multipoint, also showing memory stick and audio support - you can also find a video
of a generic M80 being setup in same place (and a video showing multi-media performance over RDP).

Axel Zero Client on Windows Multipoint Server - YouTube

Promethean's attitude seems to be you "must" use a PC to control their IWBs - despite being the 3rd largest thin client supplier, they had no interest to talking to us...

Regarding external drives, you can attached any external storage device as long at is has a fat16/24/32 filesystem, but we probably wouldn't recommend playing video direct, as the content has to go from DVD drive, over USB, over network to server, be rendered etc, then sent back over network to terminal. Would be better to copy the film onto the server and play from there....

We'd be happy to take any other questions, or supply a demo terminal...

Matthew@axel.com

[owen1978]

Why is VDI more expensive? what costs the most? Is it the licences?

For RDS (80 clients)
TS Server licenses
2008 Server License
Server CALs

So if I went the VDI route
would it be as above but with license for each virtual desktop & Win7 Licenses


Do group policies work well in an RDS environment?

[FN-GM]

If you go with VDI it will cost you the hardwareto run it on. You will need a good number of servers, a SAN etc. Each server will need plenty of RAM and the SAN lots of storage. Then there is the licensing. Then you have to buy thin clients.

My company is deploying a similar solution. We are rolling out to 15,000 users. Most users get a traditional RDS session (Citrix Xenapp) but users who are developers or have specialist software have there own VDI. It works really well. Soon we shall be rolling out the bank branches.

If you want any advice please do PM me