How to deploy 120 Samsung PCoIP Zero Clients without really trying. (Part 4)

[#1]

It's been a few weeks and my project is moving along very well.  About a week ago Teradici sent me the latest firmware 3.2 for the zero clients.  This firmware lets me have my exam rooms automatically log in with zero user intervention.   We have 90 exam rooms and our EMR is secured separate to the workstations.  How we normally handle exam room workstations is they auto login and launch the EMR software which then requires a separate authentication mechanism.  Teradici was nice enough to give me the beta to the next major firmware release for their zero clients and I've gotta say it does the trick.  I now have an entire clinic deployed and logging in without issue:

Something I've been missing in this blog is the sheer excitement I've had working on this project.  When I came here they were ghosting images one at a time using a bootable USB key.  I remember telling them they need to look into Provisioning or some VDI solution.  Less than a year later and I'm already in the process of replacing a third of this network with View.  That's pretty exciting.

For this latest deployment, I took my team and in about 15 minutes we replaced the current computers with the new zero client.  All we had to do was plug everything in, keyboard, mouse, printer, printer and power.  Took longer to haul everything out than to hook up the client.  After the client was hooked up we came back to our offices clicked a few buttons.  Specifically we followed this work flow:

PCoIP Management Console

Change Client Name

Assign to correct Group

Apply Profile

Update Firmware to Beta Code 3.2

Reboot terminal

Active Directory

Create the CUSTOM-USER

Add user to View-DEPARTMENT group

View Administrator

Assign user to desktop

Zero Client

Setup Kiosk Mode in terminal

Reboot terminal

Sounds like a lot of work but it took me maybe 15 minutes to do 5.  I think I could do 100 units in an hour if I was doing them all at once.  The most beautiful thing was walking back downstairs after this, roughly 15 minutes after we physically installed the zero client, and seeing that all of the clients where connected to a Windows XP VM and our EMR was launched asking for the password.

Obvoiusly we did a lot of work getting our XP image perfect and setting up Group Policies and such.  But you do this with Ghost or with Provisioning software, or if you are doing it manually, so that's not really a concern.  The beautiful thing is with Linked Clones once I had this single image built I deployed it in minutes and I created 15 desktops.  The really nifty thing is as I need to increase my desktops I just change that number 15 to whatever I want, say 20, and I'll have those additional 5 desktops built in minutes.  This is a HUGE improvement in how we do things here, saving money for our Students, and making everything better.

I could be a spokes person. 

[pavlouc]

Very nice, looks good, I'm in the process of messing around with the management console and have my hands on the new samsung NC240, have just updated the firmware to 3.2.0.

Only issue I'm having is multi-monitor support with Windows 7, I know the view client doesn't support it yet in automated pools.

On another note, have you tried connecting a second normal monitor to the samsung? I'm having issues where i can't set the resolution on the second screen, keeps reverting to native mode...probably cause it's not PCOIP..

thanks for blogging your progress, very good info here.

[gunnarb]

Windows 7 Support is coming, but in 4.0 Windows 7 multi-monitor doesn't work. If you look at some of my older blogs I talk about how to get Win7 to work with multiple monitors. YOu can go that route or you can just wait for the next release of View. I expect that'll be announced at VMworld, but I'm just guessing.

All of my testing is with PCoIP not RDP, hopefully the reasons for that are obvious. Try using PCoIP and see if your results change. If not let me know. I have multiple monitors on the NC240 and I do not have issues.

[pavlouc]

Thanks Gunnarb, I'll check your previous blogs, I think i've done it correctly though, loaded tools/agent then .net in that order, set the graphics card to vga ii.

When you get multiple monitors working I gather you're using x2 samsung PCOIP monitors right? Have you tried tethering a regular monitor to the samsung though? Just interested if you've tried this as I've tried now with an XP VDI too with no luck....

[mholgate]

Thanks Gunnarb for the great info on your deployment.

We are at the point of determining the Zero clinet we want to use. We demo-ed a Wyse P20 and thought it was a nice unit, very easy to setup. We are trying to get a demo of the Samungs but they are a little slow getting here. So if you don't mind, I had a couple of questions for you.

Do the Samsungs use the VESA mount, so if the monitor goes bad you can just detach and replace?

Do you know if the Zero client itself is proprietary or is it a rewrapped eVGA, etc...?

Thanks for any info!!

Mike... VM, Virtually!!

[gunnarb]

A Zero Client (any ZC) is just a Teradici PCoIP chip.  So really an eVGA is just a Teradici Chip.  The Samsung unit/Wyse unit are the same.  The Samsungs are VESA mounts however if it goes bad since it is all one unit you'd have to replace with another identical unit... not just the monitor.