hypothetical question

[andyturpie]

We have two class rooms served with 32 thin clients each and to be honest they have been nothing but trouble since day dot. We have 4 terminal servers which they connect to.

My question is, if we were to sack the thin clients and replaced them with mini workstations, would it mean we would need an extra DC to cope with another 64 physical workstations on our network.

 

These classrooms are not based in the main site, but is around 600 metres away (fibre length) from the server room. It is a fast fibre connection with trunked connection pairs if that helps?

 

Thanks in advance.

[tigerstar]

No, an extra 64 computers isn't going to tax a domain controller to the extent you'd need an additional one. And it sounds like your network is up to snuff too, so you're good to go.

[Axel]

Andy

 

You may just be unlucky with the thin client product you used - not all thin clients are alike, there are many happy users using Axel products - before you bin the whole "concept"

would you like to try something different...

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/thin-client-virtual-machines/22082-axel-ax3000-m70-lesson-monitor.html

 

PM me if interested - we can send you a loan terminal for tomorrow - our are totally different from all others - no Linux or embedded Windows - simply runs RDP direct from hardware...

[ToyHeartsFan]

We have two class rooms served with 32 thin clients each and to be honest they have been nothing but trouble since day dot. We have 4 terminal servers which they connect to.

My question is, if we were to sack the thin clients and replaced them with mini workstations, would it mean we would need an extra DC to cope with another 64 physical workstations on our network.

 

These classrooms are not based in the main site, but is around 600 metres away (fibre length) from the server room. It is a fast fibre connection with trunked connection pairs if that helps?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

You dont say how many DCs you have and what the load is like on them i.e. are log in times ok at the moment on the normal clients or are things getting sluggish? Are your DCs just DCs or are they file servers, print servers etc as well? If you are dumping thin clients why not re-task some of the Terminal servers to share some of the load?

 

I take FAST as meaning 100mb (i.e. 10mb was slow 100mb was fast) if you can I would want a gig fibre link between switches it might even fix the problems you are having with the thin clients.

[andyturpie]

Sorry we have 4 DC's at the moment (CC3 Network) but I hear thats going to change in CC4 which will be 2 DC's and 2 member servers and it is a gig fibre link between here and the classrooms

[ToyHeartsFan]

Sorry we have 4 DC's at the moment (CC3 Network) but I hear thats going to change in CC4 which will be 2 DC's and 2 member servers and it is a gig fibre link between here and the classrooms

 

If you already have 4 DCs then I doubt it will make a noticable difference unless you are already having problems. Likewise gig fibre means it shouldnt take too long to build new machines onto the network.

 

I once managed a small CC3 network and they had a single CC3 server doing everything (they did have a admin server for sims) it seemed to cope ok; it was the workstations that were more of a problem as some of them were out of the ark.

 

I assume you will go over to CC4 before microsoft kill off XP / Server 2003 which means either this or next summer hol so its done well before the 8th april 2014 deadline for XP in which case you wont be running them long anyway so I don't think you will have any problems.