Some advice on Thin Clients

[ChrisERoots]

Hello!

 

I'm after some advice on Thin Clients. We currently have a pretty large Citrix Install and i'm looking to trade some of our Workstations in for Thin Clients, repurposing the older hardware. Just after opinions as we are looking to go down the Refurbished route for our clients and i've had some Dell FX160's which seem to be working pretty well for us. At around £60 they seem like a steel but before i push on and buy 30 i'd just like some sanity checking and a feel for what other people are using and if we might be able to get something a little newer......

 

I look forward to some replies....

[MatthewL]

Why not make the hardware into thin clients, would be a lot cheaper than buying stuff if you use what you have.

[DanPTL]

Why not make the hardware into thin clients, would be a lot cheaper than buying stuff if you use what you have.

 

Yes, the OP doesn't make it entirely clear that he is no doing that. (S)He does say: "repurposing the older hardware".

[ChrisERoots]

Apologies if I wasn't quite clear enough. We will be using our older Desktops as Teacher machines, they are Core 2 Duo's with a decent amount of ram. What i'm trying to do is make a cost saving really. We're pretty tight on funds when it comes to hardware replacement. We spent a fair amount on our Citrix install and that will accommodate 300 concurrent users. Leveraging this by replacing full fat clients with Thin terminals in classrooms and pupil resource areas will allow us to use those computers as our Teacher machines for powering whiteboards and delivering better performance and reliability than the laptops which teachers currently use for everything in school and are themselves needing more repairs etc after 5+ years of daily use.

 

Our Academy was designed to be a wireless school along time ago, with teachers docking devices for each room they were in. Thats fine providing you have the money to replace lots of laptops later on down the line. We made some decisions about where we were headed when we installed Citrix and turned all of our Laptops in to thin Clients. Still, we haven't taken full advantage of what we have in place. In another 2-3 years time the Academy profile in respect to hardware will have changed again with more and more iPads coming in to the school.

[dhicks]

We currently have a pretty large Citrix Install and i'm looking to trade some of our Workstations in for Thin Clients, repurposing the older hardware.

 

Does ChromeOS directly support Citrix? I thought at one point it included a Citrix client, not sure if that is still included, and I'm pretty sure the Chrome borwser supports some kind of accelerated-graphics web-based Citrix client. Some of the new ChromeOS desktop devices might be worth a look at as cheap thin clients.

[Arthur]

Does ChromeOS directly support Citrix?

Citrix released a new Receiver app for Chrome recently.

 

http:// http://9to5google.com/2014/08/21/citrix-announces-receiver-app-for-chrome-os-allows-remote-access-to-other-devices-from-within-the-browser/

[ChrisERoots]

We have had a trial of a Chromebook. It worked well but we had to get Storefront installed first. It would not work with ICA at the time. I hope the new app which has been released will support this. Will check out those Chrome clients again. In some respects Citrix doesn't really bother about the age of a device providing you can get your build on it or customise the embedded software for your environment. I really like the FX160's they tick a lot of boxes on price, performance etc but they are pretty old now and i'm just wary of bringing more older kit in to our already ageing end user device environment.

[DanPTL]

The new Chrome Receiver app works with Storefront only. There has been lots of moaning about this from the Citrix community or least from people who can't get their Citrix admins to install/enable Storefront.

[mbuk70]

Hi, we use wyse xenith as our thin clients, work very well for us. I also convert some of our older PC's to thin clients by using software called thinkiosk. Install win7 thin PC then thinkiosk sits on top of that, great way to convert a PC and it's free, though you can buy it and get the management console, to be honest, I've not needed it.

I'm looking at using chrome books in the future, have tested some using HTML 5 and not bothering with the receiver. Need storefront installing, which is pretty easy to be honest.

[FN-GM]

Personally i would never recommend Wyse to my worst enemy. The technical support is shocking. We had issues where the wireless laptops where dropping packets and the response from Wyse was "Thats as good as its going to get". They never phone you back as they promise. Nightmare!