Anyone using virtual desktops

[danbuntu]

does anyone have experience with something like thinstation? The way I see it you could take a CF card and an ide to CF convertor. rip out the hard drives from current kit and replace them with a cf card with a copy of thinstation on. instant low cost thin client, although perhaps not as energy efficient a as 'real' thin client

[PiqueABoo]

But half the point of thinstation and the like is to just PXE boot the small image across the network i.e. you only need to go to one place when you want to update it.

[EduTech]

Don't forget SUN/Oracle VDI :-) It's very good from my expirience, nice and easy to use admin wise and the students got on very well with it. If you speak to Andy @ Cutter Project (LineScanner) or/ catch Kim Mount (kmount) I am sure they would be more than happy to talk to you about it, and maybe arrange a Trial Period for you to test in your environment!

 

Cutter Project really know what they are doing when it comes to VDI using various methods of deployment to make sure it meets your exact needs!

 

Have used them, and will use them again and will always highly recommend them

 

+ you get nice and shiney Sun/Oracle Kit! what more could you ask for

 

James.

[danbuntu]

But half the point of thinstation and the like is to just PXE boot the small image across the network i.e. you only need to go to one place when you want to update it.

 

That's true but there is a slightly different approach that can be used. The thinstation system can provide a minimal working desktop with a web browser. Potentially by moving to google apps or live@edu this could be all an end user requires as all their email, word processing etc can be accessed and edited via the web browser (students after all are mainly in the information worker category). You then have the option of booting into a vdi or vapp when needed for say photoshop or those people that must have ms office fr mail merges or similar. This would mean that you would need less load on the virtual side of things and some less servers and less licenses for the vms.

 

Because thinstation is linux based there is no need to worry about viruses and upgrades or repairs is a simple case of swap the cf card.

[dhicks]

That's true but there is a slightly different approach that can be used.

 

Setting up our thin client machines over the summer, we didn't have much luck getting Thinstation to actually boot on the hardware (various models of old PC rather than new, dedicated thin client hardware) that we had. Instead we used first Slax, customised to boot straight in to rdesktop over PXE, and then SystemRescueCD, simply because it booted on pretty much anything.

 

Slax's network boot support required both a PXE / TFTP server and a CD image made available via HTTP - the minmimal kernel would boot via PXE, then mount the HTTP-available disk image to use as a read-only file system. At first I thought that sounded like an overly-complex way of doing it, but it actually worked very well, and performance seemed pretty good, too. That might be a better way to load a minimal browser-and-rdesktop distribution.

 

What you might need the flash disk for, though, is getting older machines to boot via PXE - either that or load a basic PXE stack from a floppy disk.

 

--

David Hicks

[linescanner]

Don't forget SUN/Oracle VDI :-) It's very good from my expirience, nice and easy to use admin wise and the students got on very well with it. If you speak to Andy @ Cutter Project (LineScanner) or/ catch Kim Mount (kmount) I am sure they would be more than happy to talk to you about it, and maybe arrange a Trial Period for you to test in your environment!

 

Cutter Project really know what they are doing when it comes to VDI using various methods of deployment to make sure it meets your exact needs!

 

Have used them, and will use them again and will always highly recommend them

 

+ you get nice and shiney Sun/Oracle Kit! what more could you ask for

 

James.

 

You say such nice things. Oracle VDI is really worth looking at. It is highly capable as a VDI platform. View is also worth looking at. Be aware that which ever option you look at the initial Capex is going to be high to do it properly. You really need to look at the long term 3-5 years on the cost/management savings to see that it a good option.

[Earthling]

As a user of the Cutter Project/Sun/Oracle partnership, all I can say is that it does what it says on the tin. Support has always been timely, efficient, and delivered with a smile and patience. The new Sunray 3's and 3i's look really nice on paper, but I haven't managed to get my hands on one yet.

 

I'm desperately trying to sell enlargement of our TS coverage around the school, as I believe it's the only way to increase IT facilities within the school with the cuts that we're all facing and the even more swingeing cuts we'll all be facing for a few years yet, but I seem to be the Lone Voice so far. Our Sunray2's and 270's are 3 and a half years old now, and there's no sign of needing rolling-replacement....compared to our fat-clients which are all up for rolling-replacement after 3 years.

 

We run the Sun Secure Global Desktop system, too, for remote access to school systems, which I use a lot. Unfortunately, when questioned about the ease of use of SGD, 9 out of 10 cats....oops, I mean members of staff, of course, replied 'What's Global Desktop?'.......

 

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the Sun/Oracle solution...it works a treat for us. Yes, it's expensive kit, but you get what you pay for, innit.