your thoughts on thin clients? Wyse, Ncomputing, HP?

[holden j caufield]

will be moving to thin clients shortly. I was wondering what your experiences with them were and what solutions you used and how was the support from the company.

Thanks

 

[GobBluth]

Just got budgeted for a thin client solution at work. In my experience, Wyse terminals were all we used. That and CITRIX. Right now, there are "Zero" clients available, and your whole infrastructure can be run on VM. Very slick! That is the direction we are headed in.

If I were going to make a suggestion, I'd suggest VM architecture if you aren't there already. When I last used Citrix and a physical server environment, the administrative overhead was a full time 2 person job. Just to keep profiles in line and enough storage available. Set profile quotas from the get go.

 

[drebo]

If you have hundreds or more people doing the exact same thing with the exact same applications, they're fine. But the minute you start having to customize the applications available for the users, it makes it much more difficult.

Also, there is no cost savings. TCA is higher, TCO can potentially be lower depending on your individual company's situation and usage profile.

 

[Red Squirrel]

When I worked for the local hospital they were looking at it. We got to demo the vmware solution, and while it was a cool concept, they were starting to think of doing it only for clinical workstations then keep admin staff with their own PCs... defeats the whole purpose. If you're going to do it, it's all or nothing. The admin workstations are also the most complex due to more software so it would make much more sense to do those too. The beauty with these solutions is you are not racing to get a workstation back up and running if something fails. You just swap their thin client with a spare and they're up and running because their profile is still intact on the server.

What makes PC rebuilds so time consuming is trying to get users' profiles to be like they were. Users will be picky about things like auto completed urls and other auto complete stuff being populated as they tend to rely on those things. Those are tricky things to restore form a backup. Lot of things arn't as simple as copying the c:\documents and settings folder.

With a proper thin client setup, you have the profile stuff on raid with full bare metal backups, makes things so much easier. If you want to deploy a new app you only have to do it once, instead of having to push to 100's of PCs then try to deal with ones that for whatever reason don't want to work, or random errors etc. I hated mass app deployments because I knew it would generate millions of help desk calls which means lot of tickets our way. Thin clients stop all of this as you can test ahead of time and it's either it works or it does not, if it does, then you deploy, and you know it will work the same.

As for cost of ownership, it's probably higher as most if all of these solutions are a cost per client.

 

[imagoon]

It works as advertised but has been consistently higher cost and less consistent performance. Our environment doesn't lend itself well to 1000's of consistent desktops so they are normally built in pools per department and in reality it doesn't work as well for us. There has been a push to go back to local machines.