Any one know a good thin client / blade PC supplier ?

[Face-Man]

I'm looking for costing upgrading to a small footprint solution with virtualization and blade PCs. And was wondering if any body has had good/bad experiences ?

[Ric_]

A quick note... virtualisation is no good for your terminal servers.

 

My HP t5125 terminals and Neovo monitors usually come from Oliis Solutions (speak to Mandy on 0845 456 8556 for a good price).

[Geoff]

A quick note... virtualisation is no good for your terminal servers.

 

Ok, why? Because I can think of situations where it's helpful.

[Ric_]

@Geoff: There is a performance overhead using virtualisation and, combined with the technologies used to improve thin client computing performance, this leads to you being able to get less people connected to each server.

 

This is why Citrix becomes essential. You would only virtualise the servers so that you could move them about at will, etc. Sharing the hardware with other services is pointless when running a terminal server since you want to use as much of the processing power as possible.

 

By using Citrix, you can drop and add servers from your farm at will and all the load balancing will renogiate the connections.

[DMcCoy]

You can virtualise TS and Citrix but the general attitude from the vmware forums is that it is one of the worst types of server to virtualise although support has improved.

[Geoff]

Ok I understand there's a performance overhead for virtualising servers. Although to be fair, in my experience, I don't think it's all that bad.

 

Infact my virtualised Windows systems are faster at some things than running natively. But I'll put that down to the Linux host OS doing a better job of managing the underlying hardware.

 

Now back to my point. I had a specifc situation in mind. Say for example I bought a beefy quad core 2 server with 16Gb of ram. Now I also have a bunch of crummy applications that don't work on 64bit windows. Therefore I have to run 32bit windows. But if I do that 12Gb of ram is unusable. Hence virtualisation would be the only way to get the full use of the system and allow the use of 32bit windows. Basically I'd end up with 4 virtualised servers.

 

Or does Citrix do something 'magic' in this situation?

[Face-Man]

Thanks for that. I was acutally thinking about using http://www.clearcube.com/ blade PC's and then run virtulisation on that but cytrix is perhaps a more cost effective solution.

[DMcCoy]

Ok I understand there's a performance overhead for virtualising servers. Although to be fair, in my experience, I don't think it's all that bad.

 

Infact my virtualised Windows systems are faster at some things than running natively. But I'll put that down to the Linux host OS doing a better job of managing the underlying hardware.

 

Now back to my point. I had a specifc situation in mind. Say for example I bought a beefy quad core 2 server with 16Gb of ram. Now I also have a bunch of crummy applications that don't work on 64bit windows. Therefore I have to run 32bit windows. But if I do that 12Gb of ram is unusable. Hence virtualisation would be the only way to get the full use of the system and allow the use of 32bit windows. Basically I'd end up with 4 virtualised servers.

 

Or does Citrix do something 'magic' in this situation?

 

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=67229&start=0&tstart=0

 

It seems that at least with ESX 3 the situation has improved with citrix virtualisation performance.