tvanover Posted January 20, 2016 Posted January 20, 2016 Hi, We have a classroom at our company with 9 pc's, connected to a terminal server. We use it to give trainings on our business software (running on Windows). Because the classroom pc's are old, I am looking to replace them with thin clients. the current pc's have wireless cards, and I would like the thin clients also to be wireless. Can someone suggest some cheap yet robust thin clients that have wireless NICs? I need them to do the following: at boot, automatically logon to a Windows 2012 terminal server. so nothing fancy. I've been looking at Dell, but was wondering if there are cheaper alternatives. Can anyone give some recommendations please? thanks, Tom
RowlandoGloom Posted January 20, 2016 Posted January 20, 2016 I think the Wyse 3000 series are spot on. Specifically the 3010 customised with the wifi option http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=xctow3030tc&model_id=wyse-3000-series&c=uk&l=en&s=bsd&cs=ukbsdt1
twin--turbo Posted January 20, 2016 Posted January 20, 2016 I think the Wyse 3000 series are spot on. Specifically the 3010 customised with the wifi option The Dell Online Store: Build Your System We have hundreds of Wyse Xeniths (although wired). So long as they are kept the right way up they are generally reliable and perform fine. If they are placed upside down they overheat and die. TT
jmak Posted January 20, 2016 Posted January 20, 2016 I think the Wyse 3000 series are spot on. Specifically the 3010 customised with the wifi option http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=xctow3030tc&model_id=wyse-3000-series&c=uk&l=en&s=bsd&cs=ukbsdt1 I come back to this cyclically - it seems like thin client should be the right way to go. The trouble is, you visit the Dell site as linked here and find that for the same price you could buy a Latitude 5450 which will be much more flexible.... Why are they so expensive?
RowlandoGloom Posted January 20, 2016 Posted January 20, 2016 I come back to this cyclically - it seems like thin client should be the right way to go. The trouble is, you visit the Dell site as linked here and find that for the same price you could buy a Latitude 5450 which will be much more flexible.... Why are they so expensive? That may be the case, but over time desktops and laptops will degrade in performance and stop meeting needs. Eventually they will need replacing, paying the same price no doubt. Paying for decent thin clients, you'll get years out of them as its only usually the back end infrastructure that's ever upgraded. I still have some Wyse C10LEs connected to Windows 10 VMs with RemoteFX enabled and they perform exactly as would a brand new thin client. The council for example, have 2008R2 Citrix servers with ancient grey thin clients connected and they're still bomb proof. With Dell, personally I think you're paying for quality and, like with most other thin clients, long shelf lives.
twin--turbo Posted January 20, 2016 Posted January 20, 2016 I come back to this cyclically - it seems like thin client should be the right way to go. The trouble is, you visit the Dell site as linked here and find that for the same price you could buy a Latitude 5450 which will be much more flexible.... Why are they so expensive? what prices do you see for a 5450? they start at £500 ... 3000's start at under £230 excluding a monitor but any onld monitor is good. For us its all round lower TCO, increased Security, reduced maintenance, TT
twin--turbo Posted January 20, 2016 Posted January 20, 2016 At my old place we had HP5740 desktop thin clients. They needed the occasional re-image.. Say 20 out of 200 in 4 years. Perhaps another 15 needed warranty repair ( some of them made up the re-image jobs). Prior to them we would be pulling PC's daily for re-image, fix, repair. Every half term we would re-image a room or two to clean it up. So it was constant work just fixing end user machines, and we had slick re-imaging and application deployment to help us. With my old terminal server setup, and the one in my current place it's like Groundhog Day. Every night at 2AM the remote desktop servers restart from a clean gold image and any crap from the day never happened. We install software to one gold image and next day 500+ terminals have access to it. TT
RowlandoGloom Posted January 20, 2016 Posted January 20, 2016 Using Hyper-V, We have 2 session hosts for 'older apps' and 100 virtual Win10 desktops. User logs off, it's deleted and recreated in about 10 seconds. Once a term we update the master image, recreate the virtual desktops by clicking a few buttons. It so beats a room with 30 PCs which like you say are a pain to manage.
MatthewL Posted January 20, 2016 Posted January 20, 2016 Why not convert the PC's you are currently using to thin clients?
Steve21 Posted January 20, 2016 Posted January 20, 2016 Rowland you using basic 2012 vdi? Just got a few questions if you are as was looking at an option without Citrix etc Thanks, Steve
twin--turbo Posted January 20, 2016 Posted January 20, 2016 Why not convert the PC's you are currently using to thin clients? True you can do PXE boot to run something like LTS, but if it's on Wi-Fi you can't PXE and have to boot to some sort of mini OS first that has the wifi driver... TT
jmak Posted January 20, 2016 Posted January 20, 2016 what prices do you see for a 5450? they start at £500 ... 3000's start at under £230 excluding a monitor but any onld monitor is good. For us its all round lower TCO, increased Security, reduced maintenance, TT Admittedly their outlet store: http://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?brandId=3&c=uk&cs=ukdfb1&l=en&s=dfb But that's where I've bought most of our stuff recently. Using Hyper-V, We have 2 session hosts for 'older apps' and 100 virtual Win10 desktops. User logs off, it's deleted and recreated in about 10 seconds. Once a term we update the master image, recreate the virtual desktops by clicking a few buttons. It so beats a room with 30 PCs which like you say are a pain to manage. This and TT's comments are exactly why I think it's a good idea. I do get the point, but the upfront costs are high.
twin--turbo Posted January 20, 2016 Posted January 20, 2016 Admittedly their outlet store: http://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?brandId=3&c=uk&cs=ukdfb1&l=en&s=dfb But that's where I've bought most of our stuff recently. This and TT's comments are exactly why I think it's a good idea. I do get the point, but the upfront costs are high. Start with a room of old 2nd user terminals just as a trial, usually dirt cheap on ebay. Admittedly you may struggle on "Media Rich" content , but if you use them in the right place it's a starting point. Microsoft is catching up with Citrix+HDX for multimedia, so the situation is improving if you don't use Citrix. ThinKiosk is free and can be used to LOCKDOWN windows XP Embedded Clients. TT 1
RowlandoGloom Posted January 21, 2016 Posted January 21, 2016 Rowland you using basic 2012 vdi? Just got a few questions if you are as was looking at an option without Citrix etc Thanks, Steve I do Steve and it works spot on, without the overhead of Citrix etc.
localzuk Posted January 21, 2016 Posted January 21, 2016 From my experience of thin clients, I would advise against buying specific "thin client" machines. The hardware may survive longer, but you often find that the manufacturers stop releasing updates, so in the future when a new version of whatever protocol you're using comes out, your machines can't take advantage of it. (We had this with RDP, our HP thin clients didn't get updates to take advantage of the improved multimedia handling in later versions of the RDP protocol). Instead, I would say go for cheap desktop PCs and roll your own thin client, either using something like Parallels 2x or using plain old Windows. This is what we moved to after finding our thin clients were less than long-lifed.
Winner Posted January 21, 2016 Posted January 21, 2016 (edited) We have been testing Dell and 10 zig thin clients with Windows Embedded and while they perform well the negatives are the high cost (varying from £350 - £450), plus the extra annual license charge from Microsoft for VDA. You also have to implement another management platform to look after them. If you look at the hardware in these things you're either getting a low power AMD processor or an Atom that is a couple of years old. This was when we had our lightbulb moment - if an old Atom can support a decent experience why not a new one? We started googling "Atom mini PC" and came across this. This system can be had for £98 inc VAT, comes with a full Windows 10 license and therefore cancels out the need for VDA. We have installed Windows 10 enterprise on them, stripped back all unnecessary services and created an autologon account. We then replace the explorer.exe shell with an HTML application that launches the RDP client, effectively locking the devices to only running the one app. In testing the performance is just as good as the thin clients, we have played 1080p fullscreen video smoothly from the terminal server. Even better the unit draws between 2-5watts. This device uses a bay trail Atom, but there are cherry trail models out there with dual band wifi cards, have a look at the up and coming Pipo X6S, MeLe PCG60, and Tronsmart Ara X5 Plus. Edited January 21, 2016 by Winner
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