sandrews

I have had a similar experience with some IGel TC's we had. When looking at setting up our new Xenapp 6 environment, and moving away from MF XPe. In the end what worked for us was to remove the HDX from the server, and make sure our TC's were bang upto date on firmware. The latest firmware which did update the citrix receiver which is embedded seemd to solve it. and by removing HDX we are essentially forcing all rendering to be done on the server not the TC. We are getting perfect streaming for sound and video, and can quite happily stream a 1080p video trailer with sound from youtube to a TC. However in the whole process of gettign to this stage i found just how finicky TC's are with some things.

I have read through a lot of the Tablet PC threads and none of them seem to cover what I want. I am in need of a few Tablet (type) PC's to cover a specific need, and that is for PE teachers to take a register while on the school fields. We have: Wi-Fi coverage (or will have) over the playing fields. We Have Xenapp 6 servers running with SIMS installed (as we deliver SIMS to desktops for teachers this way) We dont need phone capability on them I would also rather stay away from Apple devices as you can garuntee that somone at some point will want to connect to something that uses flash. Does anyone have any recommendations on a decent tablet that woukld acheive a PE teacher taking a register via a citrix session over wifi. Cost does matter, but on the flip side I dont want anythign that will break when placing on a grass blade or ruin if a fly lands on it. Many thanks in advance for your thoughts

I have worked with virtualisation for many years, and the one thing I would say is there are many ways to do vitualisation and the main factor is how much money do you want to throw at it. I went through a similar process at my current school last year, the setup i did was as follows. 1 x MSA2324 Dual contoller FC connected 2 x FC switches (FC8 capable but running at FC4 as we dont need FC8, and some cost savings were made here) 4 x Dell Poweredge R710 (Dual Hex-core, 32GB memory - but configured that we can upgrade to 64GB if needed without having to replace any existing memory) Each server comes with 4 inbuilt GBit NICs but we added another 4 ports Dual port FC4 HBA in 3 servers, all dual pathed (via each switch) Switch Dual pathed to SAN (4 conenctions - each switch to each Host adapter) These 3 servers are running VMware ESX 4.x, so that any 1 server can fail (be taken down for maintenance and we are running as normal) The 4th server was put in a seperate location also running VMware but with a ton of local disk space. We use this 4th server as a failover server, we have our 2nd DC permantly runing here as a single server. We use Vizioncore vRanger to backup images and then we replicate them across the network to the backup server. In the event of a SAN failure we know that we could not bring them all up, but we can bring up the essential services for the schools to run (AD, DNS, DHCP, MIS, File erver) The remaining servers are there but would not be brought up as the server wouldnt take it. We also recently expanded our MSA2324fc with an MSA70. Total cost was around £60K with around £20k of that in software. We could have gone cheaper, we definately could have gone more expensive. But this solution I know works and was fit for purpose to bring the school forward in what we can deliver. The 4th seperate server was the cheap option to putting in a second SAN. and does cover us in the event of a full SAN failure, otherwise we are covered for single part failures in any part due to full multipathing