What programs do you run on thin clients?

[dezt]

I have a thin client network comprising of 26 Wyse winterm clients and a big beefy server runnig windows 2003 server in terminal services mode. Now here's the main question, what programs can I run on the thin clients? What sort of programs do you guy's run on these things. I have no experience with these thin clients so I don't know what will run and what won't.

 

I do know that microsoft office works ok, but I don't know what else will.

 

 

Also, where are the thin clients located, we have 2 ICT suites that both have 26 desktops in them, the LRC has 30 P4 3Ghz desktops in and the graphics and resistant materials rooms both have a full compliment of desktops. I have no idea where these things can go.

 

Will Parsql run on these, does anyone use Pars on thin clients?

[CyberNerd]

we run pretty much everything on the thin clients.

Only problems we find are old 16bit apps and heavy media rich apps

[Norphy]

We're going to be deploying a small TC network in our maths department. It is going to have a whole load of maths software on it like Derive, Autograph, GSP etc.

[adamyoung]

We mainly run MS Office although they work suprizing well with video (citrix this is). We also enabled the web client so students can access the apps from home which is really popular.

[gcheeseman]

Thin Clients are perfect for web browsing and basic 'Office' type stuff.

 

Back where I come from in the commercial world, they're typically used for 'single application' clients. EG Call Centres where the user only ever has one/two programs running at anyone time.

 

They are not suitable for the likes of us (techno geeks who absolutely must have XX applications running at full speed, like, now!).

[NetworkGeezer]

we run pretty much everything on the thin clients.

Only problems we find are old 16bit apps and heavy media rich apps

 

Everything? You must have quite a beefy server farm.

[CyberNerd]

CyberNerd wrote:

we run pretty much everything on the thin clients.

Only problems we find are old 16bit apps and heavy media rich apps

 

Everything? You must have quite a beefy server farm.

 

7 servers so far, 3 due for retirement.

we've bought an extra 5 IBM blades (dual 3GHz Duron 3GB, U320) which will bring us to 9. This should allow us to take 300 concurrent connections. Hopefully come september we'll have no studnet XP machines and no HDD's !

[NetworkGeezer]

What do you do in science or D&T where they have instruments or machines to conrol?

 

What do you for scanning? Do your clients USB flas drives?

[openhgs]

We run everything on the curriculum side. Our LTSP servers each handle 15 clients without blinking. I think that we could easily support 50 clients per server, each running OO. Currently we have 120 thin clients and we could easily expand this to 400 without increasing server capacity.

 

Thin Clients are perfect for web browsing and basic 'Office' type stuff.

They are not suitable for the likes of us (techno geeks who absolutely must have XX applications running at full speed, like, now!).

 

In a typical classroom, each student will have 3 or 4 instances of Firefox open (they don't seem to know about the tab feature), a couple of OO files (document and spreadsheet), and a couple of other things Kuickshow, KAtomix, Tuxpaint, etc. So each user will have 10 or so apps running (say 30 students per class), 3 classrooms full. The servers hum along without any problems. Our only bottle neck seems to be Internet access, whicg does slow considerably when 100 people are browsing at the same time. We are not alone in needing a bigger pipe.

[CyberNerd]

What do you do in science or D&T where they have instruments or machines to conrol?

 

What do you for scanning? Do your clients USB flas drives?

 

It is possible to do USB/serial mapping but currently students work on farm then run the program on the teachers whiteboad machine XP.

we don't have any scanners, but again they will map to citrix.

 

Actually I was a bit enthusiastic about our thin client deployment, by sept we'll have 300 thin clients (mostly linux but some winCE) - but we do plan on keeping XP running autodesk (their licensing prohibits use on citrx - even though it probably would work) and for some music applications and we have a suite of OSX machines for imovie.

 

My ideal situation would be to do as OpenHGS does -run it all on LTSP and just use citrix in published application mode for MS only applications. It would save a bundle on licensing, but the teachers here are very pro windows desktop here and don't like change:( - I understand LTSP can run local apps as well - nice.

[Ric_]

I use thin client (citrix) for damn near everything. The vast majority of clients are linux based with some runing WinCE and some XP boxes for attaching scanners and whiteboards to.

 

Most multimedia apps seem to run fine and there's all manner of stuff on there (which probably doesn't get used). I find IE to be resource hungry and will be experimenting with an alternative browser in the Summer break.

 

As for concurrent connections, I currently use 5 servers with upto 30 connections at a time - i have one more server to configure and i love the way citrix load balances for you.

[NetworkGeezer]

Ric is that

 

30 or 300?

 

On a busy day we could have best part of 200 PCs in use.

 

I wonder how Citrix would cope with a couple of classrooms doing PowerPoint and others on SWF intensive websites.

[CyberNerd]

I find IE to be resource hungry and will be experimenting with an alternative browser in the Summer break.

 

I looked briefly at installing Opera into thinstation. I got it working, but had some problem with the locked down settings for students - something else came up and I sort of forgot about it. There is a firefox and flash package for thinstation too. Running local apps where appropriate is the key to reducing server load.

[Ric_]

Ric is that

 

30 or 300?

 

On a busy day we could have best part of 200 PCs in use.

 

I wonder how Citrix would cope with a couple of classrooms doing PowerPoint and others on SWF intensive websites.

 

That's 30 per server... i.e. 150 across the 5 servers. When I bring the 6th server online it will spread the load. Citrix recommend 30 per server but it all depends on what is going on. I have dual opteron 248s with 4GB of RAM so they don't mind the work - althought the crummy KS3 testing stuff raped the CPU usage - 5 clients per server!!!

 

As for handling all those whizzy apps, it depends on how you configure Citrix to manage the load. There is a seamingly endless list of metrics that are measured and you can specify any of them (even in combination!) to spread the load. This means that you could, for instance, have a server farm of varying speed servers with differing amounts of memory and you could stop users being assigned to the server when X% CPU has been reached or Y% RAM is used. You can also assign users to the least utilised servers in this way.

 

If you are bothered about such things, Citrix will even send you an SMS telling you that your servers are getting busy or that one's disappeared from the farm, etc.

[dezt]

I have found an old looking disk here called citrix metaframe 1.8, is this the citrix that you are all talking about? Or should I be looking at something else. Like I said before, I don't know anything about these thin client networks.

[petectid]

We mainly run MS Office although they work suprizing well with video (citrix this is). We also enabled the web client so students can access the apps from home which is really popular.

 

I'm presently looking into doing this using Citrix Secure Gateway, quite a way off yet but one thing I have been told is there are licensing considerations that must be taken into account when giving access to suites like Microsoft Office. Although the windows session is running on your windows server, the actual client device needs an office license so it ain't just a case of assigning say 20+ office licenses to the server and restricting connections to office. You have to buy a license for each client device that uses office.

[NetworkGeezer]

@Ric_ & CyberNerd

 

Program Neighborhood or full desktop?

[CyberNerd]

I'm presently looking into doing this using Citrix Secure Gateway, quite a way off yet but one thing I have been told is there are licensing considerations that must be taken into account when giving access to suites like Microsoft Office. Although the windows session is running on your windows server, the actual client device needs an office license so it ain't just a case of assigning say 20+ office licenses to the server and restricting connections to office. You have to buy a license for each client device that uses office.

 

Certainly you'll need MS CAL's for terminal services - sudents are covered by the external connector lcense. AFIK it is ok to allocate a eg 20 or 30 office licenses to each server, but I'd be interested if you have any more details.

 

Program Neighborhood or full desktop?

 

We publish the full desktop but also the individual apps - for semi-fat clients we can deploy the individual applications but our diskless thinclients are full desktop, hopefully when I get time i'm gonna try and go more towards published apps.

[Ric_]

I publish full desktops too.

 

As for licensing... you need a TS device CAL for every device that wants to access the terminal server, along with a server CAL. AFAIK you nleed as many office licenses as you have clients that can connect. Your MS reseller should be able to help you out.