Noob Question: Thin Clients and VMWare

[Spicer]

Hi Guys and Gals,

 

Firstly, apologies if this has been covered elsewhere on the forum, but I've had a dig around and not been able to find anything that gives the information I'm after.

 

I'm in a situation where I've inherited an ESX (v4.0) and need to use it to set up a training environment. The way the training works is that I'm given the VM images, and then need to make a copy for each student who (until now) has been connecting to their machine via VNC. This has worked OK, but we have now moved location and we were using some really archaic Unix boxes to connect, which put out a lot of heat, noise, and had pretty poor graphics performance.

 

I'm looking into using thin client hardware to either connect directly to the images on the ESX if this is possible (PCoIP, VM View?) or using a VNC thin client and installing VNC on each of the VMs as we have been doing in the past. A majority of VMs that the students connect to are either Unix or Linux so I'm guessing RDP is non-viable. From reading around VDI does not seem to have many fans, but given that I'm stuck with the ESX and the resources I use are given to me as VM images I'm pretty stuck with it.

 

I'm really after some advice on how is best to connect to the VMs, both in terms of performance, thin client hardware, and if I need to install / license any server-side software.

 

Any advice gratefully received. If there's any information I've left out that's useful then just let me know.

[Axel]

Hi Spicer, and welcome the forums,

 

Since no one has responded I'll offer my halfpenny's worth.

 

RDP is much more efficient than VNC, (due to Microsoft's millions) - but VNC should work fine over a LAN, tho would probably struggle on a WAN.

 

The video below shows a device, which I think is unique in having an on-board VNC-client - for connecting to Linux type GUI envionments. (in fact anything with a VNC server in it, it also has embedded VNC server for remote control)

 

The video shows a connection to W2012, with NLA and all that good stuff, but you will be able to see the VNC setting and should be able to imagine

how that would fit together.

 

 

On a "standard" Linux multi-user system you would run multiple instances of the VNC server on the Linux server - each one on a unique port, and each client would connect to its own port, but for your ESX setup it sounds like each VM has its own IP address - so VNC can be left to run on its default port. (Or put another way - the client just needs to see an IP address and port to connect to...)

 

There have been various attempts over the years to port RDP (server) on Linux, ie RDP over "X" - but I don't know how active these projects are, for example:

xrdp

[Spicer]

Hi,

 

Cheers for the response. Interestingly enough, after a bit of digging around I found the Axel site the other day and have placed an order for a trial unit to test out. It looks like it should do the job, so I hope that'll be the problem resolved.

 

Many thanks.