New Facility build for thin clients

[EZE]

Hello Guys/Gals,

I am in a unique and envious position and would like some non-biased advice.

My school district is currently close to completing a brand new K-12 facility and have approx. 1300 students and 125 Staff. After swaying back and forth between the traditional PC / server setup with approximately 500 PC's or going with Thin Clients, I have decided to go with the Thin clients for my students (500 clients). If you had your choice to get whatever you wanted what would you pick? THe VMWARE solutions or the Citrix XEN solutions? The only decision I have made so far is to purchase the HPt5570 Thin Client. I'll have approx 20/23 12 core AMD blades with 172GB of RAM.

This is a totally new venture for me , but, I don't want to re-invent the wheel

 

I am planning Server Virtualization(2008R2) and Windows 7 desktop virtualization for the clients.

Edited January 18, 2011 by EZE

[strawberry]

The first thing to consider is do you really want all thin client solutions?. Do you have the bandwidth available?, will you have any software that wont sit well on a TS?

[imiddleton25]

we use the citrix xen solution and both wyse xenith and Axel M80 zero clients , did try the hp thin client but was over priced and not as good as other solutions in my opinion. I found the support from HP lacking found several pages on their website that said check out comunity forums for help and support. Hp just dont seam to be pushing the thin client snd its development. thats my experience.

 

how many thin clients you looking at for 500 students?

[Soulfish]

We've got a Citrix XenDesktop 100-seat deployment using Wyse Xeniths. It's been built to scale out to possibly 1000+ seats (1-1 computing!), and have found the system to be quite good. Do make sure that you know what can/can't run off of a virtual desktop. I'd also look at virtualising some of your applications using XenApp/Terminal Services to help relieve the load from the virtual desktops. We currently run the system on 4 x Dell R715's each with 2 x AMD 6176SE 12-core CPUs (24 cores ) and 64 GB RAM. Each windows 7 desktop is allocated 2 vCPUs and 1.5gb RAM

 

We opted for XenDesktop over View as it worked better for our environment at a cheaper price. Any questions just let me know

[EZE]

Thank You all for the reponse. I will have approx 500 Thin clients servicing about 1200 students. The staff will have a networked PC at their desk for their SMART board and other programs. I will have a 10G backbone and gig to the desktop/thinclient. Bandwidth should not be a problem. We won't be running very much software in addition to Office. Most usage will be done via web based solutions. We will have a 100M connection to our ITC. I'm leaning toward the citrix solution with Xen server and Xen app. I will do some additional research on the HP clients in regards to your concerns, thanks for the heads up.

[Butuz]

You need to make sure you are not going to be running any software anywhere in the school that could have problems on thin client. Programs such as video editing, audio editing, some design technology / animation may not function too well on your proposed solution. In that situation you would be better off having a suite (or more) of fat clients just for heavy application use.

 

If it is just a bit of web browsing / office you should be fine. Do bear in mind though that some animated flash sites can be quite resource intensive and could give you a shock if your system does not scale.

 

I would recommend some small scale testing first i.e one ICT suite before you go ahead and order 500 and possibly find that it doesn’t do what you wanted!!!

 

Also - HP thin clients are totally outclassed by modern equivalents such as Axel M80. I would seriously reconsider your choice of HP clients.

 

Butuz

[Axel]

Hi Eze,

 

There have been a few references to Axel above, if you would like a terminal to trial alongside your current devices please feel free to contact our US Office (FLA).

 

Axel: Find a Distributor in America

 

You will be the judge as to if it is better or not - but I can guaranty it will be very different to any other TC you may have tried !!!