Help setting up thin clients

[Fabre]

As the title say i was a bit too eager to jump into virtualization and thin clients and i ended with a bunch of thin clients with CE 6.0 embeded thin clients not knowing that the RDP protocol would be way too slow even for normal web browsing

I have a setup with a beefy i7 pc that i deemed as a good server and 6 thin clients all plugged into a switch which is also into a 20mbps isp modem

the results are largely underwheling as i was expecting to run the average internet needs from people at a library or even other more demanding activities like flash games for a classroom

is there something i can do so the thin clients perform better or some type of hack so that it doesn't try to connect using the RDP protocol and the CE 6.0

apreciate any input and help

 

[VirtualLarry]

or some type of hack so that it doesn't try to connect using the RDP protocol and the CE 6.0

Uhm, that's how "Thin Clients" work. They use screen-sharing protocols like RDP, to connect to a server. I think that your problem is the CE 6.0. I had that on a 7" CVS Netbook, running a slow ARM CPU. It was pretty close to unusable. See if you can update that hardware to CE 7.0. Newer OS versions, support newer and better RDP protocols.

Other than that, if you're unhappy with the performance, you might just have to scrap them.

 

[yinan]

Your problem isn't with the thin clients, or the protocol, your problem is with the hardware backing them. You have an i7 PC with MAYBE 8 cores in it, and you are expecting to server 20 desktop sessions with that? You should have at least double that number of cores. This is because all of the screen rendering is being done by the processor, not the video card, and the processor sucks at it.

 

[PliotronX]

RDP has been pretty responsive in general IME. You can try adjusting the "desktop experience" settings (lowering color depth, disabling desktop composition etc.). Like Yinan said though, you need more physical cores.

 

[drebo]

He said 6 clients, which any i7 with 16gb RAM should be able to handle no problem.

The issue here is that any Windows CE 6.0-based thin client is long since end of life.

My preference is for native PCoIP thin clients using VMWare Horizon View. Extremely snappy and very very good.

 

[Fabre]

for extra input, i haven't run all 6 clients at once, the teary and sluggish performance it has now was from only connecting a single thin client to the server and trying to watch a couple youtube videos

i also have done nothing but modify the registry to allow multiple remote desktop session to happen at the same time on the server

I'm quite the noob when it comes to virtualization, it just seemed like a good solution and i'm willing to give it heavy study if i find the right places to search for info

anyway, the thin clients i've got have the following specs
CPU: ARM11 CLG7700 800MHz
128MB RAM
128MB flash
Win CE 6.0
VGA, 3 usb, mic/speaker plug and the hidden usb port (why does it even have a mic plug if it doesn't support it)
they are all brand new, they were bought like 4 months ago but never saw any use

i noticed it has a mini-usb port hidden inside the casing for flashing purposes and a row of 8 jumpers, so i figured i can tinker with them to get somethign better that the incredibly sluggish view it has now, remember is some sort of test for a classroom meant to do simple browsing and using flash games

another factor that i'm sure is slowing them are the massive monitors the terminals got, 1280x1024 i don't have any smaller than that and i'm sure is putting more strain on it that it can handle with the current factory-setup

other than that i don't know what kind of info i can give to make my situation more clear, i don't have a broad bucket for this project and i want to make the most of the stuff i already have (the 7 clients of which i'm using 6)

thank you for the responce

 

[azazel1024]

He said 6 clients, which any i7 with 16gb RAM should be able to handle no problem.

The issue here is that any Windows CE 6.0-based thin client is long since end of life.

My preference is for native PCoIP thin clients using VMWare Horizon View. Extremely snappy and very very good.

This. Looking at the specs, ARM11@800MHz is going to frankly suck on the experience end of things for a thin client. There is still SOME work that it has to do, it isn't all the server doing the work.

RDP is not great, especially for video, but the more recent RDP instances are better. Something like 360 or even 480p video is not too terrible, so long as you are not expecting perfect 24/30FPS performance. For general interaction like basic (BASIC) flash games, internet browsing, MS office work, email and so forth it works great.

 

[drebo]

for extra input, i haven't run all 6 clients at once, the teary and sluggish performance it has now was from only connecting a single thin client to the server and trying to watch a couple youtube videos

i also have done nothing but modify the registry to allow multiple remote desktop session to happen at the same time on the server

I'm quite the noob when it comes to virtualization, it just seemed like a good solution and i'm willing to give it heavy study if i find the right places to search for info

anyway, the thin clients i've got have the following specs
CPU: ARM11 CLG7700 800MHz
128MB RAM
128MB flash
Win CE 6.0
VGA, 3 usb, mic/speaker plug and the hidden usb port (why does it even have a mic plug if it doesn't support it)
they are all brand new, they were bought like 4 months ago but never saw any use

i noticed it has a mini-usb port hidden inside the casing for flashing purposes and a row of 8 jumpers, so i figured i can tinker with them to get somethign better that the incredibly sluggish view it has now, remember is some sort of test for a classroom meant to do simple browsing and using flash games

another factor that i'm sure is slowing them are the massive monitors the terminals got, 1280x1024 i don't have any smaller than that and i'm sure is putting more strain on it that it can handle with the current factory-setup

other than that i don't know what kind of info i can give to make my situation more clear, i don't have a broad bucket for this project and i want to make the most of the stuff i already have (the 7 clients of which i'm using 6)

thank you for the responce

RDP won't handle youtube (or any media, really) very well at all. If you need media, you'll need a more advanced VDI manager. Citrix and VMware have flash/media acceleration, in addition to the protocols being more advanced and higher quality. You could conceivably leverage RemoteFX, but I don't know whether or not that supports shared graphics resources.

RDP is great for low-bandwidth connections, but very poor for media.