What advantage is there to having a broker?

[TDJB3]

I have briefly looked over several products and don't see a real advantage to a broker, yet I don't want to overlook something.

We are building a case to use virtual machines instead of PCs. The plan considers having individual machines for each user and not pools of machines to share.

Thanks for any thoughts.

BTW - I really did appreciate the post in regards to the number of virtual machines per blade server.

Another BTW - If your interested in trying to calculate your eletrical savings by switching to virtual machines and using thin client devices, check out this site http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html

[mreferre]

Dave (Crosbie),

I totally agree with your analysis. However there is something that I am missing regarding Windows CE device support.

Off the top of my head I can think about a handle of main "devices" that you would need to support on the thin clients which are :

\- printers

\- USB drives

\- SmartCard readers

These two devices are already supported by the ultra thin clients (i.e. Wyse Thin OS). Every other type of USB device I can think of (USB license dongles, Bar Code readers etc etc ) would get limited support anyway in an RDP session due to the RDP limitations (i.e. no matter if you use a thin client that supports these devices you would get troubles exporting these devices into the RDP session itself).

Can you expand a little bit more on your analysis ?

Thanks. Massimo.

P.S. for info ... I am trying to create a table with (tentatively) all thin clients available and with the most relevant brokers out there .... for those that need to check which device works with which broker.

See at the very bottom of:

http://it20.info/misc/brokers.htm

It is pretty much work in progress as you could see.

Message was edited by:

king@it.ibm.com