VDI / Terminal services

[richbrowncardiff]

Hi all,

 

We are at a point where its going to cost £110k + to replace a load of our old machines. I want to start investigating using old machines as thin clients connecting to a TS farm or looking at proper VDI

 

Can you tell me what you do and give me an idea of what it's cost you ? i probably will have 60k to start with.

 

Our server & network infrastructure is good so am not concerned about this but would like to know more about our options...

 

Many thanks in advance

[Roberto]

We've looked at this and implemented a few trials, and from where I'm sitting going to VDI or Terminal Services is more of a case of choosing where to spend the big money, and less about saving money. The capital outlay you save on the workstations frequently ends up invested in infrastructure and/or servers instead.

[glennda]

For VDI - you SAN is the most important part - What kind of numbers are you talking about and can post some recommendations.

 

Also what do the users run on the machines

[richbrowncardiff]

Hi there, many thanks for your replies. @Roberto i agree and think this may well be the case. Glennda i am looking at 300 (to start with) concurrent clients, they will run office, Serif suite, internet access etc,

 

As much as i would love to see them running DT software I wouldn't of thought it would handle it?

 

Many thanks

[glennda]

Hi there, many thanks for your replies. @Roberto i agree and think this may well be the case. Glennda i am looking at 300 (to start with) concurrent clients, they will run office, Serif suite, internet access etc,

 

As much as i would love to see them running DT software I wouldn't of thought it would handle it?

 

Many thanks

 

VDI will handle what you throw at it - given the correct underlying hardware. For that kind of setup it really is worth doing some assesment of the current load on the client machines. Liquidware Labs Stratusphere Fit is a really good tool for telling you if the work done on the clients will fit into VDI. It also tell's you the average IOPs required if. So you can then plan the IOP requirements for the storage. You would probably be looking at 15-25 IOPS per VDI machine. Also there ProfileUnity is very good for managing applications within VM's on a per user basis while not assigning them perm desktops.

 

I am just rolling out a 150 user VDI for a client now, we have setup 3 host with 196gb ram in each and each VDI workstation being assigned 2GB ram.

 

I am then working on a 600 concurrent seat VDI project which will again be hosts with Lots of memory and a Nimble CS420G X2 which will be able to handle the VDI's without even flinching.

[richbrowncardiff]

@Glennda many thanks for your advice. I will look into the IOPS needed and also look at the assessment tools available.. Appreciate your advice!

[PotNoodleTech]

Are we talking for use in a school?

 

My experience of VDI / Terminal Services is that, for a school anyway it's more of a case of ending up grabbing it by the scruff of the neck and trying to make it work well, rather than it being a feature designed for schools to work well out of the box. Kinda like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole with a hammer - you'd be better off just buying round pegs (fat clients).

 

If you must use it, take however much ram you think you need and double it, however many iops you need, double it (run it on SSDs), and however many clients you think you can fit on a server, half it. It should work adequatly then, even if it does end up costing you more than fat clients would have.

Edited December 2, 2013 by PotNoodleTech

[glennda]

Are we talking for use in a school?

 

My experience of VDI / Terminal Services is that, for a school anyway it's more of a case of ending up grabbing it by the scruff of the neck and trying to make it work well, rather than it being a feature designed for schools to work well out of the box. Kinda like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole with a hammer - you'd be better off just buying round pegs (fat clients).

 

If you must use it, take however much ram you think you need and double it, however many iops you need, double it (run it on SSDs), and however many clients you think you can fit on a server, half it. It should work adequatly then, even if it does end up costing you more than fat clients would have.

 

That is essentially right! Your biggest cost will be Licensing for any VDI deployment. I can highly recommend Nimble Storage devices which are designed with VDI in mind. They give you the performance of SSD's but not the cost with the CASL architecture.

 

Would you run the VDI on dedicated Hardware or share it with the Server infrastructure?

[richbrowncardiff]

Thanks everyone for your feedback ! yes its in a school (big) and if i go down this road then it would be dedicated hardware for the VDI setup and the main servers would remain as they are...

 

I will look into the nimble SANs as have heard a lot of good things about them.

[glennda]

Thanks everyone for your feedback ! yes its in a school (big) and if i go down this road then it would be dedicated hardware for the VDI setup and the main servers would remain as they are...

 

I will look into the nimble SANs as have heard a lot of good things about them.

 

Yes they are really good for VDI if you have any questions give me a shout I am more than happy to help on the VDI side (if VMware!) or any questions on Nimble.

[funscott]

have a look at atlantiscomputing.com its the future.

 

we are in the process of POC for a VDI rollout we intend to support 350 concurrent users after 3 - 4 years (50 - 100 clients added per year)

 

we will be using 2012 datacenter (Hyper-v 3) in a cluster

 

costs involved

 

[TABLE=width: 587]

Hardware 20k (2 servers)

Zero Client (inc monitor, keyboard / mice)) £340 each

Microsoft VDA annual License (zero clients devices) £21.70p per license

XenDesktop perpetual License £100 per license

Xendesktop annual Support £17.70 per license (compulsory 1st year)

Atlantis perpetual License £50 < rough price

Atlantis annual Support £7 per license

 

 

with atlantis no need for expensive SAN. we will be using our SAN for soem storage.

 

IOPS through the roof as the pooled desktop wil lbe ran in memory rather than from spinning disks.

[Dave_O]

TCO higher than buying a standard PC with a 5 year warranty so what is the justification? Are all the users external?

[Dave_O]

Thanks everyone for your feedback ! yes its in a school (big) and if i go down this road then it would be dedicated hardware for the VDI setup and the main servers would remain as they are...

 

I will look into the nimble SANs as have heard a lot of good things about them.

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/thin-client-virtual-machines/68166-my-conclusions-vdi-other-things.html

[glennda]

TCO higher than buying a standard PC with a 5 year warranty so what is the justification? Are all the users external?

 

Not always - the reduced management overhead can bring the price TCO down a lot!

 

It isn't a solution for everybody and TBH I don't think it suits Edu. It is very good for large companies who house all Kit in Datecenters as it works very well over WAN.

Edited January 15, 2014 by glennda

[funscott]

i agree initial costs are higher (about £65 per box)

 

however I would expect a 50 -60% drop in electricity costs (17w vs 30 -40w)

life expectancy of vdi client an extra 2 -3 years so purchase costs drop off dramatically after 5 years (from 60k per year to around 15 -20k)

saving in staff costs (support staff time to fix hdd etc)

flexability for users, internal / external access (with netscaler)

end device is irrelevant so enhances end user experience (happy customers = happy IT)

 

we have also made a saving on potential server hardware (3k) so overall slightly less than £65 per box

 

we are a private boarding school so remote /external access is important.

 

I see this fitting very well within education, fits ours anyway as we have very little locally installed applications (we use APPV for 95%)

 

printing solution also works as we use virtual printers (with papercut) so dont need to worry about geographical location of device

Edited January 15, 2014 by funscott

[Dave_O]

Not always - the reduced management overhead can bring the price TCO down a lot!

 

Out of 800 PCs and 200 laptops which range from Optiplex 745s to 390s and more recently the lenovo M72e, L420s each year we get 3-4 failures (mainly from the older machines which are out of warranty) ie approx 0.4% failure rate. Re-imaging using system center 2012. Some areas of school I havn't visited in 2-3 years. Hardly excessive management overheads.

[glennda]

Out of 800 PCs and 200 laptops which range from Optiplex 745s to 390s and more recently the lenovo M72e, L420s each year we get 3-4 failures (mainly from the older machines which are out of warranty) ie approx 0.4% failure rate. Re-imaging using system center 2012. Some areas of school I havn't visited in 2-3 years. Hardly excessive management overheads.

 

I pressed submit before I had finished, but that is a very good hardware failure rate.

 

VDI isn't a fit for everyone I will agree that but it can be very good - but it can also be completely wrong.

[funscott]

I think i have read through your experiences of VDI before. im guessing a SAN based solution with expensive disk with low IOPS. the atlantis ram disk takes away IOPS and disk costs (we have a SAN) but would never consider VDI with a SAN as the IOPS are jsut too low for the amount you spend.

[localzuk]

You're very lucky with those figures. We average around 10 machines a year that need some form of physical repair. Then on top of that, re-imaging and deploying software etc... to a much higher percentage.

[glennda]

I think i have read through your experiences of VDI before. im guessing a SAN based solution with expensive disk with low IOPS. the atlantis ram disk takes away IOPS and disk costs (we have a SAN) but would never consider VDI with a SAN as the IOPS are jsut too low for the amount you spend.

 

Which sans have you looked at? I wouldn't say that TBH, SAN's are a must for VDI IMHO but the correct hardware is a must.

[Dave_O]

i agree initial costs are higher (about £65 per box)

 

however I would expect a 50 -60% drop in electricity costs (17w vs 30 -40w)

life expectancy of vdi client an extra 2 -3 years so purchase costs drop off dramatically after 5 years (from 60k per year to around 15 -20k)

saving in staff costs (support staff time to fix hdd etc)

flexability for users, internal / external access (with netscaler)

end device is irrelevant so enhances end user experience (happy customers = happy IT)

 

we have also made a saving on potential server hardware (3k) so overall slightly less than £65 per box

 

we are a private boarding school so remote /external access is important.

 

I see this fitting very well within education, fits ours anyway as we have very little locally installed applications (we use APPV for 95%)

 

printing solution also works as we use virtual printers (with papercut) so dont need to worry about geographical location of device

 

Think you'll find the energy saving is not as high as you imagine if you factor in the backend consumption.

Life expectacy - we are still running dell 745s which are years out of warranty and are still good after 6 years and as I mention in my original post who wants an IT solution that lasts that long. Things will have moved on.

Staff support time - we spend 0.4% of our time on fixing EU machines not a big cost saver.

External use - yes it's good for that but why not just use a terminal server or Ericom? Hundereds of times cheaper. We use VMWare View for external access for staff and it's very good for that. If we need to make it available for students we'll just get an external connector terminal server license and use that.

We use AppV and ThinApp and they cover some apps (definitely no all) and papercut.

 

In short I am struggling to see the justification for spending this amount of money on a solution that has limited ROI and applicability

[funscott]

We have a hp eva4400 (fiber channel disk 15k disk x 48)

 

we will be using Dell r910 in a cluster using hyperv (initial 2) increasing to 3 in year 3

 

server specs will be quad 8 core (32 cores)

512gb ram

10gb nics

the SAN will be used for CSV

 

but the desktop will be pooled running in ram so no IOPS to worry about

 

netowrk is being upgraded to 10gb,

 

 

comes down to end user experience, zero clients instead of thin clients (doesnt look good), TS old tech limited end user device access (published through UAG) we require vendor neutral access.

 

it also comes down to how our POC delivers if its not as good or better than our current end user experience it will be getting canned.

Edited January 15, 2014 by funscott

[Dave_O]

i agree initial costs are higher (about £65 per box)

 

however I would expect a 50 -60% drop in electricity costs (17w vs 30 -40w)

life expectancy of vdi client an extra 2 -3 years so purchase costs drop off dramatically after 5 years (from 60k per year to around 15 -20k)

saving in staff costs (support staff time to fix hdd etc)

flexability for users, internal / external access (with netscaler)

end device is irrelevant so enhances end user experience (happy customers = happy IT)

 

we have also made a saving on potential server hardware (3k) so overall slightly less than £65 per box

 

we are a private boarding school so remote /external access is important.

 

I see this fitting very well within education, fits ours anyway as we have very little locally installed applications (we use APPV for 95%)

 

printing solution also works as we use virtual printers (with papercut) so dont need to worry about geographical location of device

 

In the end you have to ask yourself (and you really do have to be honest here) is this an effective use of your school's money or would spending a third of the budget to get standard PCs laptops etc (to the same effect) and offering the remaining money to other areas of the school budget be a better way to go? If I was a governor at the school with that level of investment I would want some buy in from staff, not just IT staff trying to convince me, but general teaching staff who have tried the solution (yes for that level of expenditure I would expect that it had been extensively trialled) and can recommend it. And following a review of the implementation after I year if there were concerns I would sack the person who proposed the solution on the spot.

[funscott]

dont worry our POC will be 6 months minimum with staff having access to zero clients throughout the school. in different locations / uses. we are at a cross roads. do we want to continue spending 60k a year on PCs or look for a more efficient technology which give the same / better performance with the bonus of vendor neutral access and more flexability. centralized management and potential power saving costs. the POC will cost about 5k (got a great deal on a used R910 for testing) We wont be getting sacked if it all goes wrong as we arent jumping in with both feet and spending 100k+.

 

ps we ruled out vdiinabox as it is a good idea but the IOPS were very limiting and we viewed a full production setup.

[Dave_O]

dont worry our POC will be 6 months minimum with staff having access to zero clients throughout the school. in different locations / uses. we are at a cross roads. do we want to continue spending 60k a year on PCs or look for a more efficient technology which give the same / better performance with the bonus of vendor neutral access and more flexability. centralized management and potential power saving costs. the POC will cost about 5k (got a great deal on a used R910 for testing) We wont be getting sacked if it all goes wrong as we arent jumping in with both feet and spending 100k+.

 

ps we ruled out vdiinabox as it is a good idea but the IOPS were very limiting and we viewed a full production setup.

 

If you're spending £60K pa on PCs that, by my estimation, equates to about 200 PC per year. I assume you don't allow machines to go out of warranty. Here's a thought why not keep the machines for a couple of years beyond warranty and cut costs by 40%-60%? Our experience is that machines last up to 2 years beyond warranty (we take 5 years on PCs/laptops purchased in the last 3 years). That will reduce your refresh costs by around £20K!

 

Interested in this vendor neutrality. What thin clients are you going for? How long are you expecting them to last? How long are the warranties on the thin clients?

 

When you have this in place I would be interested in seeing it in action. If nothing else to restore my faith in this technology, which of you hadn't guessed already, is at rock bottom.