Thinclients

Bl8ckr0uter

Do any of you have thinclients implemented in your workplace? At my current shop most people RDP into a few TS and do most of the work from there. We have aging desktop machines and I am considering requesting a refresh for next years budget. The company obviously wants to save money and I think instead of buying brand new machines, we could order thin clients since most users don't do anything on their local machines anyway. Anyone have any experience with this? What were some of the problems you faced? What product(s) did you use?

Devilsbane

We had some where I went to school. I wasn't impressed, they still have a lot of work to do. They don't even recognize a flashdrive if you plug it into one of the usb ports yet. Thats a staple in my book.

earweed

Depending upon where you work you may not want it to recognize a flash drive (for security)

Devilsbane

earweed wrote: »

Depending upon where you work you may not want it to recognize a flash drive (for security)

Well it was a college, and all of the desktops supported flash drives, so I don't think they would have intentionally disabled it for the thinclients.

arwes

I don't have anything to add other than that we're looking at going this route too. This would be used for our service personnel, most everyone else will be using laptops. All our branch offices log into their local workstation and then RDP to our terminal server.

Bl8ckr0uter

earweed wrote: »

Depending upon where you work you may not want it to recognize a flash drive (for security)

Exactly. Hipaa is going to get even tighter next year which will require more encryption for data at rest.


I am just throwing this out there, it seems like citrix is pretty popular for this purpose.

Devilsbane

PRO is that they lagged like crazy when I was playing jetman on facebook a couple years ago so I was able to set a huge high score.

But that certainly isn't worth implementing them.

pml1

We use several at remote sites. Our server farm is at the home office, so they're slow as Christmas. Everyone who has to use them complains about them, but they definitely serve a purpose. We have some on Citrix and some that on Terminal Services. We upgraded Citrix a while back and many of the old thinclients bugged out on, so we switched those over to Terminal Services.

For your users who are already connecting via RDP, there really shouldn't be a performance decrease, so it might be a good way to go.

dratnol

knwminus wrote: »

Do any of you have thinclients implemented in your workplace? At my current shop most people RDP into a few TS and do most of the work from there. We have aging desktop machines and I am considering requesting a refresh for next years budget. The company obviously wants to save money and I think instead of buying brand new machines, we could order thin clients since most users don't do anything on their local machines anyway. Anyone have any experience with this? What were some of the problems you faced? What product(s) did you use?

Knwminus, what are your goals and needs for the users that could be serviced by thin clients? Some programs willnot work in a terminal environment so that needs to be taken into consideration.

At work I am running over 60 thin clients, I love them. Depending on what hardware you get, flash drives can work. If your users need Internet access and do office suite tasks, thin clients would probably be a good fit. If you have special software or hardware, then not so much.

Your first step is to analyize what your users need to do their jobs. When you have those tasks identified you can begin to determine if thin clients will work for you or not.

arwes

Any brand recommendations for thin clients? The main thing I'm looking for is RDP 7 and multiple monitors. I just looked at a WES-6000v from 10Zig (getting an all your base are belong to us flashback) but haven't found pricing on those.

http://www.10zig.com/thinclient/6000-series.php

Edit: Also, are these companies diametrically opposed to showing the ports on these things?

Bl8ckr0uter

dratnol wrote: »

Knwminus, what are your goals and needs for the users that could be serviced by thin clients? Some programs willnot work in a terminal environment so that needs to be taken into consideration.

At work I am running over 60 thin clients, I love them. Depending on what hardware you get, flash drives can work. If your users need Internet access and do office suite tasks, thin clients would probably be a good fit. If you have special software or hardware, then not so much.

Your first step is to analyize what your users need to do their jobs. When you have those tasks identified you can begin to determine if thin clients will work for you or not.

Dratnol: My goal is pretty simple: To reduce TCO of desktops. We have very little specialized software and about 99 percent of it is in house development. I think we could reduce our energy usage and overall speed of access for our customer service folks. I also think getting us on a unified platform for all desktops would be awesome as well.

arwes wrote: »

Any brand recommendations for thin clients? The main thing I'm looking for is RDP 7 and multiple monitors. I just looked at a WES-6000v from 10Zig (getting an all your base are belong to us flashback) but haven't found pricing on those.

http://www.10zig.com/thinclient/6000-series.php

Edit: Also, are these companies diametrically opposed to showing the ports on these things?

Multiple monitors would be huge for me as well. We have some users that use 2 monitors and even some with three. Having to monitors would greatly improve the overall productivity for users.

arwes

knwminus wrote: »

Multiple monitors would be huge for me as well. We have some users that use 2 monitors and even some with three. Having to monitors would greatly improve the overall productivity for users.

We put in dual monitors a couple of years ago and some of the people complained (one older guy even turned his right monitor off so it didn't confuse him ). Now if I were to put them on a single monitor I'd be in trouble!

Devilsbane

Everyone has dual monitors here. Every now and then one will break down and some of the end users can get pretty pissy that its gonna take several hours for the desktop team to get to their desk and replace it.

Bl8ckr0uter

arwes wrote: »

We put in dual monitors a couple of years ago and some of the people complained (one older guy even turned his right monitor off so it didn't confuse him ). Now if I were to put them on a single monitor I'd be in trouble!

Lol that's funny. I don't think anyone here would complain about that.

forkvoid

I use thin clients extensively at the clients I support.

XP Embedded is garbage. Not sure on CE. Wyse Thin OS (WTOS) is fantastic. No experience with Linux.

I use only Wyse, which are great. I use the S10(now defunct, but available as refurb for cheap at vecmar.com) and the V10LE.

Be sure to investigate your environment thoroughly before beginning a deployment. You screw up the first try and your users will be EXTREMELY hesitant to try it a second time. Make sure all software you will need will function on the server perfectly with multiple users going at once(you and a coworker logged in together, working the same piece of software). Limit the devices that can be plugged into the thin client, for protection of the server. If at all possible, do not use local printers, only network printers running through your standard print server. Too many print drivers can cause some serious issues(our terminal server is currently crashing about once every other week due to bad print drivers).

Bl8ckr0uter

forkvoid wrote: »

I use thin clients extensively at the clients I support.

XP Embedded is garbage. Not sure on CE. Wyse Thin OS (WTOS) is fantastic. No experience with Linux.

I use only Wyse, which are great. I use the S10(now defunct, but available as refurb for cheap at vecmar.com) and the V10LE.

Be sure to investigate your environment thoroughly before beginning a deployment. You screw up the first try and your users will be EXTREMELY hesitant to try it a second time. Make sure all software you will need will function on the server perfectly with multiple users going at once(you and a coworker logged in together, working the same piece of software). Limit the devices that can be plugged into the thin client, for protection of the server. If at all possible, do not use local printers, only network printers running through your standard print server. Too many print drivers can cause some serious issues(our terminal server is currently crashing about once every other week due to bad print drivers).

Thanks for the tip. My goal is to get rid of all local printers and use our imagerunners exclusively.
Canon USA - imageRUNNER

subl1m1nal

I've used Wyse terminals in the past. Not a bad product. Dratnol is right, it really depends on your needs.

Any high end graphics like photoshop, autocad, premiere, etc, would be a no go for thin clients.

I was at one point looking at VMware VDI, but it couldn't do the high end graphics that I needed.

The situations where terminal servers seem to be best are for places like hospitals that only need office apps and maybe a records database.

arwes

It looks like for RDP 7 usage we're going to have to use Windows Embedded 7 to meet our needs. If we were to go with Wyse, it looks like the R90L7 is what we'll have to go with. Looks like they're going for about $650 each at Provantage, so I don't know if we'll be able to get the board of directors to bite. I'm going to talk with my boss about getting one for us to try out for a little while.

N2IT

knwminus wrote: »

Exactly. Hipaa is going to get even tighter next year which will require more encryption for data at rest.


I am just throwing this out there, it seems like citrix is pretty popular for this purpose.

We have dozens of applications hosted via Citrixs. I personally love it since upgrading to Windows 7. Xen Apps works like a champ!

Xcluziv

subl1m1nal wrote: »

I've used Wyse terminals in the past. Not a bad product. Dratnol is right, it really depends on your needs.

Any high end graphics like photoshop, autocad, premiere, etc, would be a no go for thin clients.

I was at one point looking at VMware VDI, but it couldn't do the high end graphics that I needed.

The situations where terminal servers seem to be best are for places like hospitals that only need office apps and maybe a records database.

Yea, we were using Neoware thin clients but started phasing out to the WYSE which were a little better than the Neoware. They do their job, but like you stated no high-end graphics need to be used on a TC. Oh yea, once they die its OV for a thing client

xenodamus

I work for a medium size hospital and we've just started down that road. So far, we've rolled out 25 WYSE C10LE devices. Forgive my ignorance in advance, because I'm not involved at all on the back side of this stuff. Each thin client is running a virtual machine in vmware and using Citrix hosted apps (Xenapp) for a variety of different applications. Everyone has been more than satisfied with the speed and performance thus far, but these are just nurses who run a citrix application to chart patient data. So there isn't alot required of these boxes.

The hospital tried to go thin more than once in the past, and it never worked out as well as planned for various reasons. These new devices with the VMware and Citrix infrastructure seem to be a different ball game, though. They plan to install another 100 by Christmas. After that, we'll see just how many of our 2000 PC's we can migrate over time.....