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Sun Ray use UDP. The sound works fine on them. I have a school running LTSP on HP T5xxx series thins and sound works here also.

No Machine NX will give you the access to the desktop. We use it to look after some remote school Linux deployments. Works a treat. Runs over port 22 so is also secure

I have bearded goats.......2 with one stone Merry Christmas all

I do have a large supply of goats that I am willing to share

Sorry Dad but my advantages are better than his

Yeah but it also cuts down on the flexibility

You do need a Solaris/Linux Server to control the Sun Rays. You can have any desktop you want pretty much. Windows XP/Vista/TS(Citrix), Linux, Solaris and even Mac OS X. The *nix server is there to provide the instructions/firmware details and connection info to the Sun Ray. SR are not thin client as most know them. They are Ultra thin. They have no OS on them in flash etc. This is what makes them very flexible.

Re SIMS, all of the systems we have deployed are Running SIMS on Sun Ray and via SGD for working at home. We have a school where Sun Ray have been deployed just to run SIMS for staff. It has been a massive success. Drop me a PM for more info if you need any. Done properly Thin Client is a great asset, done badly it will cause headache after headache. The whole art is establishing where it will work and where it wont.

We are a Sun partner and have deployed a load of Sun Ray across UK education. We have found that all our customers have really benefited from going down this route. Sun Ray does have a high life expectancy, estimated 220,000 hrs between failures. The advantage that Sun Ray has over traditional Thin Clients is that they are platform agnostic. We can paint Windows/Linux/Solaris or Mac through them. In the changing world of IT this flexibility is a cool option. Power saving is another big win. 200 Sun Ray 2 desktops will save roughly £12k-£14k a year in energy costs over traditional Fat Clients Server centric computing also has other major benefits in maint and management. Sun Ray is Ultra Thin (no embedded OS), a firmware upgrade of 400 devices takes no mare than 60 seconds. To answer some of your questions 1. See above on time to failure. Sun have customers that are using gen 1 Sun Ray that are 10 years old. 2. No moving parts what so ever. 3. This scaling needs to be done correctly. In a typical set up of ours we reckon 25-30 concurrent users per Terminal Server. 4. Thin Client has only really become a really viable option over the last 2 years. All my customers have come back and bought more. I have one school that have over 400 (70% of school computing). They are all happy. The whole art to this is expectation management. Thin Client is not the answer to all. They do have limitations. Identify the areas where thin will not fit and use fat. The areas that it does fit in our opinion it is a no brainer. Hope this helps. If you need any more just drop me a PM

SGD is the way to go for this. The students and staff can access your internal servers from a java enabled web browser. The other option (more expensive) is Sun Ray laptops at home. The connect over the users existing Broadband to a VPN concentrator at your site. This then tunnels to the internal Terminal Servers.......school desktop at home

How big do you need ?

We have a number of 1000 s of Sun Ray deployed in UK education. Most of the schools use the Macromedia suite of apps. They run fine in the most part, Fireworks needs to be kept an eye on. We use load balancing to ease some of the isssues. The art is scaling your TS farm to cope. What is the spec of your TS servers and how many concurrent users do the accept ?

Some of the issue is that the exam boards (should be vendor neutral) are not. They still say things like open excel spreadsheet etc. I run our company off Open Office and have had very very few issues. I have a school of 650 pupils that are using Star Office 8 on Linux desktops.....the kids are fine, the staff took a bit of time to learn new ways. You need quite a bit of SLT support to get it through. The move is probably less painful than 2003-2007. Open Office can be set to auto save in .doc format also to help the migration

I have just had a look at the stuff Sun are doing. It is called project wonderland. Looks a bit cool. Here is the link https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/binary-builds.html

We do a load of Thin Client work in schools, we have avoided Primaries as we feel that the nature of the computing done is not what Thin Clients do best. I would be cautious about deploying them unless you are happy that the application stack you have will run well. Most of the issues are around the multimedia intensive apps used in primaries. The other one to look at is the infrastructure required to run server-centric computing. Most primaries are not geared up for this.

This is what has come from the Alphaplus win funded by Becta See below Becta awards unknown with advocacy deal The good news is that Ian Lynch, Miles Berry and others have had some input into the info that goes on it I think. At least with Ian and Miles on board there is a good chance that there will be some quality info provided down the road.

Not a huge amount of experience using the MS stuff to publish apps/desktops. We use Sun Secure Global desktop for this and the performance is excellent. I would go over your DNS with a fine tooth comb though, it is the root of all evil with this type of technology. Andy

I would back Ric. Virtual TS servers I feel are not the way to go. You would get better performance from physical tin.

First thing to check would be that you have working reverse DNS. Not having it is a prime reason for slow logons. The other one to look at is profiles. Pathing, application data redirection etc. Most of the schools we run on TS are at around 10 - 15 second logon

Ubuntu, Debian and SUSE. However starting to fall in love with OpenSolaris

Depends on what hardware you are looking at using. I would run it on Ubuntu if you are Linux happy. Personally I run it on Solaris. Goes like the proverbial brown stuff off a teflon stick. Solaris is a bit bit less hardware friendly though. Need to choose it carefully.

FMS does work on TS. I have a number of my clients running it

This is not the case. The Sun Ray is just used to paint a picture. Currently the majority of our deployments in schools are Windows 2003 TS. We have SGD providing SIMS access for staff remotely and the students can get to their desktop for home.

You could always look at Sun Ray and Sun Secure Global Desktop. Works out much cheaper than Citrix and has some really cool features that Citrix does not. Sun have a very good pricing model for schools

@kmount, The RAM thing depends on the number of mailboxes and concurrent usage. Lots connected via Web frontend will need a chunk of RAM Andy