ThinClient advice

[pantscat]

I'm thinking about dabbling in the world of ThinClients but have a few questions.

 

I've got about 60 PCs in one particular room (a rather ridiculously huge room) and the performance is suffering (they're low powered AMD Athlons with 512MB ram) - I'm not sure I'm going to get the funds to replace them in the near future and the performance of the machines starting to affect the quality of teaching there.

 

So... I though I'd have a look at ThinStation with Windows 2008R2 RDS - mainly because it's technology that I'd feel fairly comfy with.

 

Can anyone offer any advice? These are my main questions:

 

1. Is ThinStation the best terminal software? Is there anything else that would be better for 'free'?

 

2. How do you setup a 'base-image' using Remote Desktop Services? Is there a nice guide anywhere?

 

3. What sort of spec server would I want to use for 60-ish clients? (I do have an old Dell PE2500, dual Xeons 12GB RAM, not much disk space though - maybe 120GB in RAID 5).

 

4. Is there anything else I need to know before I delve into the world TS?

 

Much appreciated!

 

Ant

[carvjo]

Download details: Remote Desktop Session Host Capacity Planning in Windows Server 2008 R2

 

This document is useful when capacity planning..

 

2X do nice client builds - and it is all centrally managed - the converted PC pulls the image by PXE at boot time..

[pantscat]

Thanks - will check out the capacity planning doc.

 

What does 2x offer over ThinStation? anything in particular?

[carvjo]

Thanks - will check out the capacity planning doc.

 

What does 2x offer over ThinStation? anything in particular?

 

RDP7 - and ease of use..

 

We have a farm of 4 x RDServers (Terminal Servers in old money) - all running as VM's - 2X does the load balancing and clever stuff like assigning machine images to hardware types..

 

There are other options though - whatever you are comfortable with and can afford..

[pantscat]

@ carvjo - Thanks for that - it's all food for thought.

 

How do you do your storage for the VMs? is it locally attached or do you have a SAN?

[dhicks]

Is ThinStation the best terminal software? Is there anything else that would be better for 'free'?

 

I had issues getting ThinStation to boot via PXE, we wound up using first Slax and then SystemRescueCD instead - Slax actually comes with its own PXE server, so you can get started right away, and SystemRescueCD seems to be kept very up-to-date with drivers for assorted network cards. All you really need is something to run RDesktop, although something that can also run an up-to-date local web browser (and plugins) might be a good idea so you can have web browsing happen locally and take some load off your TS servers.

 

What sort of spec server would I want to use for 60-ish clients?

 

This previous thread might come in handy:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-server-2008-r2/48272-hardware-requirements-terminal-server.html

[pantscat]

Thanks David.

Hadn't thought about web-browsing locally... that's an interesting idea!

[carvjo]

We have a Blade Centre with a number of Blade Servers for the processing and a SAN for the storage.. We've got IBM kit because it met our needs/price and there is room to grow - we use VMWare VSphere..

 

I can't say I know the nuts and bolts of it all - I try to keep my hand in, but spend far too much time pushing paper and smoothing troubled waters (I would be in trouble if our NM ever decided to leave!)

[pantscat]

Just curious as I have a vSphere setup here too, but only an iscsi SAN so would be a little bit concerned about over saturating the link.

 

I think I'll have a play around with the old Dell as a guinea-pig and see how I get on!

[carvjo]

iScsi is fine - that's what we use - the iSCSI traffic all runs on it's own vLan and performance is pretty good..

[pantscat]

Ah - that's interesting. We have our own dedicated redundant network for the iscsi traffic - so it won't even impact on the 'normal' LAN.

 

In that case... I'll just fire up a new VM and have a play!

[pantscat]

Can anyone explain how you customise the RD environment for the logged on user?

 

Basically the user just gets an RDP session to the 2008 server, is that right?

 

Do I then just lock it down by applying Group Policy objects to the server? or is there a 'better/proper' way to do it?

[Axel]

You can do that - most people probably do...

 

Or if the Client supports it you can use RemoteApp...

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/thin-client-virtual-machines/65083-remoteapp-thin-clients.html

 

...or when your Axel terminal arrives on Monday you can use a free utility from our website call AxMenu - where you essentially "publish" selected applications

on a per user or per group basis. The users can access these applications only and have no access to a desktop or any other part of the server...

[pantscat]

Hmm... interesting - hadn't thought of using Remote App - was just playing around with it this morning and thinking that it worked surprisingly well.

 

Will wait for the terminal to arrive!

[Shirpa_10ZiG]

Hi Pantscat,

 

What applications do your users require? In an ideal world and in the future?

 

Kind Regards

James

[Dos_Box]

@Shirpa_10ZiG. This is borderline commercial use of the forums against our AUP. Please be careful.

[pantscat]

Hi James,

 

It all depends on whether I look at TS for students or staff...

 

For staff it would be VERY straightforward:

- Office

- SIMS.net

- Adobe Acrobat

That's probably about it.

 

For students there would be a list of apps as long as my arm!

 

Regards,

 

Ant