Thin client options. Non-MS DHCP and DNS server.

[LSUJeff]

We're currently running VI 3.5 for all of our servers and I've been curious about desktop virtualization for about 190 end user machines. I'd love to reduce the number of hours that I spend managing all of that hardware.

First of all what are the advantages/disadvantages of going with a high horsepower client with XPe and lots of memory vs. a cheaper linux based terminal. I'm mainly concerned with a good end user experience.

Also, I'm a department on a college campus so some services such as AD, DNS and DHCP are provided to me by the university and there would be a lot of political red tape and work involved in trying to split off from them on that. DNS and DHCP are not provided through AD/Windows servers either. Also, DHCP requires annual web authentication based on MAC address by the end user. So, every time a MAC changes the user will lose off campus connectivity unti the open their browser and re authenticate. What kind of problems can I expect working around these? Does the user effectively get a new MAC every time their VM is created?

Thanks,

Jeff

[jfischer-GaTech]

Jeff --

I also work in a department on a college campus and we have a very similar setup -- AD, DHCP, and DNS are all provided centrally. There are a lot of options, but here's what we do with View -- We have our Wyse V10L thin clients set with DHCP reservations. The hardware has a fixed MAC address so we can set up a permanent reservation on the DHCP server, along with some DHCP options that tell the Wyse OS where to get its configuration file. These boxes are very low horsepower -- and cheap. The Wyse OS is tied into View Manager so a user will then log into the Wyse terminal to initiate an RDP connection using passthrough auth via AD to a pool VM that was entitled via View Manager. The end user experience is pretty good, especially using all the Wyse add-on TCX software for multimedia, usb, and sound -- and Flash video support is coming soon.

As far as DHCP for the VM pool (we're using View Composer linked clones for our pools), you don't have a lot of choice out of the box -- I beleive a MAC is randomly assigned to each VM as it's created. Right now we are either going in to each VM and setting a static IP manually, changing the VM's MAC address to one which we have a previously set reservation, or allowing unrestricted DHCP -- depending on the subnet. We plan to test a script that will go in and look at each VM machine name after the pool is created and reset the MAC to a matching value from a DB or something to that affect so it can use reservations. Don't know if that will work though.

Hope that helps.

Jeff

[LSUJeff]

That's good information. Thanks.

Overall would you recomend it as an alternative to they typical PC implementation? My goal is to reduce the man hours spent maintaining and replacing 180+ PCs every 4 years while preserving the individual desktop functionality. My "staff" has been cut back to just me and a 20 hr/wk student worker so I'm looking for ways to improve our effectiveness. I'm dreading the start of the new fiscal year in July where I will be expected to replace ~40 desktop PCs with new ones.

95% of my users just do things like internet, MS Office, access windows file shares and run a mainframe terminal session. Of course they all goof off, watch You Tube, play iTunes etc. As of now those activities are not specifically prohibited so if I negatively affect this functionality my bosses won't care but it will probably hurt my relationship with the users. I have that 5% remaining that use photoshop, MacOS, video editing, etc that would likely just continue to have dedicated hardware.

[LSUJeff]

Also, I know this is a VMware forum but was also considering Operating System streaming, rather than complete VDI, as a potential solution that would reduce management time.

Can anyone comment on OS streaming with diskless PCs vs VDI in general given the enviromnent mentioned in my previous post?

[jfischer-GaTech]

As long as you have the resources to support the back-end infrastructure (servers, SAN, network, etc.) then I would say yes, I would recommend -- for your simple task-based users. We have held off until now deploying to staff because of the Youtube issue, but with Wyse planning a TCX Flash release in May I feel comfortable planning for staff deployment very soon. Goofing off on the web is no biggie, and iTunes or Windows Media Player should work for music as long as you have the Rich Sound add-on (haven't tested that though) and they bring in their own music on USB drives (no CD's on a thin client). I am trying to make the user experience as close to 'real' as possible, but I am also not afraid to tell my users they can't do something if it's going ot save us time and money. We are on target to replace 95%+ of our 350 PC's with thin clients by the end of next fiscal year. The other 5% are our power users and MacOS users and VDI is just not there yet for them.

I just saw your post about streaming the OS -- we tested Wyse Streaming Manager prior to making the leap into VDI and just felt that it wasn't as reliable as VDI. Just setting up the environment was kind of a pain, and the industry seemed to be moving towards a better VDI experience rather than full OS streaming so we went in that direction. We are using application streaming with Thinapp for both VDI and non-VDI environments and that is working well for most of our non-standardized apps. Big ones like photoshop have some performance issues but overall it's been a good way to deploy applications quickly.

[LSUJeff]

Ga Tech huh? I'm at the LSU Athletic Dept. How'd you like that bowl game?

[jfischer-GaTech]

I've seen better I won't hold the LSU thing against you.

I'm in the Distance Learning and Professional Education dept at Tech.