Zero client tera1 and View 6.2

[ctcbod]

Hello community,

Please can someone tell me if they are successfully connecting to View 6.2 via a zero client tera1 chip?

I won't bore you all with the details, but we are finalising the steps before upgrading the View environment to 6.2 and just want to check if all our tera1 chip zero clients (Wyse P20) are going to work properly.   I see that the last supported firmware for the tera1 chip is 4.7.1, although the only supported firmware for View 6.2 is 4.8, which we cant use on 80% of my VDI estate.

The annoyance here is that when we bought the P20s over 4 years ago, they were meant to have a 6-7 year shelf life and although they all work well on 6.1 (I know that's unsupported on firmware 4.7.1 as well).  Either way, we want to get a good few more years out of the (mostly) trusty tera1 zero clients.

Thanks....

[jeniferslabaugh · Accepted solution]

Yes, I just implemented View 6.2 in an environment with lots of Tera1s earlier this week.  They did not work on firmware 3.5.1, but after an upgrade to 4.1, they are working.  At firmware 3.5.1, the View Connection server logs were filling up with "WARN : The pending session on machine xxx for user yyy has expired".  That error went away after I upgraded the Tera1s.

We have also lab-tested 4.7.1 but I don't have it in production anywhere yet.  I imagine anything over 4.0 would work.

[ctcbod]

Yep, thanks for the reply - we had to update last night for various reasons and we couldn't test, which is why I asked here, but can confirm we have had no issues with 4.7.1 as yet.

The teradici site says:

For VMware Horizon releases above 6.0.1 (including Horizon 6.1), Teradici is able to provide technical guidance for basic VDI connectivity with Tera1 zero clients.

I've also seen somewhere that application pools are not supported on the tera1 chips.  We're not using these as yet but hoped to start next year, so the lack of full support for the tera1 chips is disappointing as we're not planning  to move to tera2 chips until 2017. With this in mind, it's worth looking closely at the tera2 life cycle before committing to purchase.

Whats's the usual life-cycle of a zero client?  Our Wyse P20s are rock solid so we've always looked at 6-7 years.

[jeniferslabaugh]

Agreed about the P20s, those things will run forever.  I know one organization that has had 100 of them in production since early 2009 and they've only lost one to a lightning strike in that entire time.

I can't guarantee it, but you should be fine on the Tera1's until 2017. Teradici itself has said they are providing "technical guidance" on the Tera1's through December of 2016. I'm lab testing each new View version with a Tera1 myself, so feel free to PM me if you are about to upgrade View in the future.

Regarding the EOL, Teradici's hand was forced by View changing the authentication scheme in the 5.x version.  I asked the same questions you did on the Teradici forums, and their CTO replied with a technical explanation for the switch.  I copied his response below, the link to the entire thread is here: Tera1 and View No Longer Supported as of 6.0.1? - Teradici

"As the Teradici CTO, let me add a little color to this discussion. When support for Network Appliances (e.g. Cisco, F5,...) was added to the protocol (back in View 5.x), this created a new authentication scheme to allow these devices to be an authorized-man-in-the-middle. We did not have the ability to support both the old and the new authentication scheme in the Tera1 devices so they stayed on the "old scheme". Starting with Horizon 6, VMware is only certifying clients that use the new authentication scheme and have not indicated that they will add any new capabilities nor provide support for clients that use the old scheme (which includes older software clients, too).

Because of the large install base of older clients, I do not expect that they will disable the old authentication mode. Since they are not doing any new feature development in that mode, they are also unlikely to break compatibility. However, fixing any issues that might arise for "old mode" clients is not committed by either Teradici or VMware. which is why we have made this End-of-Life announcement.

Tera1s have been on the market for 8 years and we stopped selling new chips to our partners 3 years ago. You will notice in the KB that we are providing "technical guidance" until December 2016 which will give everyone at least 5 years of guidance even if you were one of the last customers to buy a Tera1. Even as CTO, I have several Tera1 devices in my various offices (in fact I am using one right now). I am running pre-released code that is even beyond Horizon 6.1.1. I fully expect that they will continue to work well beyond December 2016. However, if you need new Horizon features or the new capabilities in Tera2 devices, then you will need to upgrade. If you need a guarantee that your Tera1 devices will continue to work on future Horizon releases, then you should also upgrade. Or, you can just keep using them until a Horizon release comes out that breaks compatibility with the old authentication mode - if and when that occurs.

We just want to be clear about the facts so you can make an informed decision."