Fast Track to Thin Clients with a CC3 Setup

[bodminman]

Hi there,

Inherited an RM CC3 network and would like to look at providing thin clients in certain areas to provide straight forward access to office apps, internet and printing.

 

Can anyone recommend the most cost effective route to acheiving this?

 

Is the only route to go via RM?

 

Thanks

[Chris_]

You're probably best looking into RM terminal servers. I believe the RM terminal server license is ~£495 (including a Server 2008 R2 license). Unfortunately RM only support 2003 terminal servers at the minute. It's basically just a server that has been 'smart cliented' to be setup like a workstation. I guess you could go for a vanilla Windows terminal server but you would lose out on being able to manage it like RM workstations.

[morganw]

I don't think they have any official routes for thin client solutions, not that they wouldn't sell you something but it would be customised to your requirements. You can use anyone's solutions or your own, just create a new OU for the terminal servers, block inheritance, create GPOs and use loopback processing for user settings.

[morganw]

...or ask about CC4 Anywhere which is there XenApp solution which can work with thin clients and also gives remote access.

[Chris_]

It is a solution that RM do support and sell.

 

Here's the RM page that mentions CC3 terminal server's and licensing: Secondary Community Connect 3 Server Licensing

[bodminman]

...or ask about CC4 Anywhere which is there XenApp solution which can work with thin clients and also gives remote access.

 

I don't want anything to do with CC4 so I maybe looking into your first suggestion further!

[mjs_mjs]

I played with it for a bit and found it was faster (by a huge margin) to just go with windows than an RM solution.

 

I made a server (off the domain) then smart cliented it onto the network as a standard workstation, then installed terminal server and played with the theme to make it look like XP (was on server 2003 at the time). it worked, just very slowly.

[Marci]

The TerminalServer and ThinClients that we were supplied with by RM are / were a nightmare. 60 Samsung thin clients, all of which have now died inside of 5 years with no sign of getting them repaired... with no audio support (The ThinClients themselves supported it, but the linux boot distro RM used to initialise everything didn't support the audiochipset, & didn't support adjustment of mouse speed either - defaulted to the fastest I'd ever seen a mouse go). The TerminalServer itself falls over with monotonous regularity. It still gets used, but only via old laptops that aren't worth repairing - rip out the hard-drive, make them boot off the network - doneskis.

 

Whether RM have improved their TerminalServer/ThinClient solutions for CC3 since this lot was installed, I don't know... but it put management completely off thinclients permanently here, and amounted to a £20k investment that we may as well have just chucked out of the window.