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pc over ip questions

D

dmankg

n00b
Joined
Nov 18, 2009
Messages
11
hi all,

i have a question regarding pc over ip stability.
i work as a system admnistrator in hotel with 44 rooms.
my boss wants to install 44 virtual desktops to guests so guests can watch tv and use computer on their tv sets located in room. endpoint desktop portals will be connected to tv sets and acts as a monitor and tv set.
also he wants distribute IPTV to rooms. we have one network switch 48 gigabit ports.
all desktop portals will be connected to this switch. dvb ip streamer will distribute satellite channels. stream tv channels consume 5mbs for each guest. using virtual PC probably increase traffic but i think 1 gigabit switch is enough.

for guests only basic functions of pc will be available in rooms such as ms office products, explorer, some basic games. all other functions will be limited. special software will limit guests using PC and IPTV simultaneusly. guests will use only PC or watch IPTV. they will no be allowed to use both.

for me pc over ip is very new technology and i need some advices what kind of equipment we need in order to deploy this system. before i was planning to install to every room one pc and operate in this way. but when i found pcoip articles it was surprise for me.
main question is what kind of server we need to get to meet our requirements.
if all 44 guests simultaneusly watch IPTV we probably need server with very powerful graphic card. how many ram do i need. on desktop portals ms server 2003 will be istalled and office and that is it.
which desktop portals are most stable. what software do we need.
i am looking forward for your advices.
 
at the moment i"m working on rolling out a sunray server solution for remote desktops with vmware view 4 on the back end. view 4 support pcoip, but I happen to be using RDP on the back end and ALP (proprietary sun UDP protocol) between the sun ray server software and the sun ray DTU's. Using thin clients would probably be the way to go for you, if you have LCD TV's you could probably even VESA mount them. I'd shy away from putting x86 hardware in each room.
 
PCoIP technology puts the PC in the 'server' room and the display anywhere on the local LAN, only drawback is the user devices connect to the monitor with DVI, no svideo or VGA/RGB.
There is no upgradable OS installed on the desktop portals (at least the PCoIP ones I use), its an embedded OS with limited options.
The portals I use are $399 each, that would be a large outlay for you to startup with
 
i thought it is possible to connect tv set using dvi-hdmi converter.
we wanted to buy 44 pc to each room and connect it to tv sets using hdmi output.
each pc probably cost us same money as portals.
also it is quite difficult to maintain all 44 pc i mean viruses, cooling etc in this case we would expeirence everyday pc "cleaning".
we wanted to buy portals instead and then run virtual pc on this portals. so if any problem virus or something we can just delete and create new desktop on the server and that is it.
special software is beeing developed to allow guests choose following options on tv screen
1. tv mode ( watching tv channels) . vlc player receive streams from dvb-ip streamer. during this mode bluetooth keypad locked.
2. pc mode (guests can use ms office software, explorer, some basic games) keypad unlocked.
3. interactive tv (guests services video on demand, room service, housekeeping, pay channels, weather, taxi and more stuff) keypad locked. for vod vlc player will be used. all movies will be stored in local sever.

two days before all of this was planned in another way like 44 pc running in each room. pc location was under tv set box. but this way is quite difficult coz cooling, noise, maintainng problems.
when i have found pcoip articles it was quite intersting if it is possilbe to virtualy run all this pc on powerfull server. this server sends display images to portals in each room. good thing is portals are quite. i just dont know if we can do this using pcoip technology. what kind of equipment we need in order to meet our tasks. coz a lot of graphics will go through software which allow running 44 virtual pc's. and can pcoip support huge loads of graphic . we also seeking advice what specs of server can meet requirements of our task.
 
if you use vmware view 4 you can do pcoip w/o the teradici chips, so no funky hardware, just a bunch of ESX hosts on one side, and thin clients on the other. PCOIP get's done in software. I'm using sun ray 2fs DTU's so I have to use ALP not PCOIP, but I'm pretty sure there are other options.
 
we will definetly use vmware 4. esx hosts will run on server righ? all 44 desktops run on server is it correct. i want stable system and planning to buy server but don't have any idea what specs of server do i need;)
this is my first virtualization project! also i do not understand where do i need graphics card coz a lot of high definition video pass through pcoip. finally is pcoip is capable to run our task smoothly and stable. for example if all guests starts watching video is vmware is stable doing this or may be some other problem could occur. pcoip is quite new protocol and i just want to make sure that my task can be deployed and works stable.
thanks for advices !
 
yes, you need to purchase server hardware for running VMware ESX. you'll also need to purchase licenses for VMware view and have a vcenter server. the view and vcenter servers can be virtualized. not sure if thin clients will work well for doing an iptv implementation, but they would be great for office apps and the like. I know you can buy wyse thin clients with teradici pcoip accelerator cards, but I've never used them. The setup you are describing might work best with something like the samsung 930nd as a client endpoint device http://www.samsung.com/us/consumer/office/monitors/specialty/LF19BKBLB/ZA/index.idx?pagetype=prd_detail

as far as servers go, i"m not really too sure. most of my ESX servers are sunfire x4450's, 128GB RAM and 24 cores each (intel 7400 series cpu's) but an upcoming vdi project I might be getting a cluster of sunfire x4170's, which use intel 5500 series (nehalem) CPU's, would be 8 cores and up to 192GB RAM in each 1U chasis.
 
unfotunately samsung monitors is not too suitable for hotel rooms. we probably get one wyse thin client and test how its work. vmware software is very expensive but dont have a choice! do i need only one server or? we were planning to buy one server like 128 gbram, four quad cores hp or dell. procceso intel or amd optiron. bad thing is we r in kyrgyzstan and here nobody knows about virtualization and we cant get any advice. also no equipment for testing therefore we r buying one by one. me too not sure if iptv works well using pcoip coz huge simulateneus streams of high quality videos. earlier phoned to russia and asked about specs of server we need we 've been told to get only 32 gb ram, 2 core processor and it would be enough. well i understood that we have no choice but testing testing and testing. good is that vmware give 60 days trials also we can afford to get 1 wyse and check how it works but again it can work fine with 1 think client but with 44;)
 
Your going to need a pretty hefty server to run 44 virtual machines, with each streaming video.
I dont know if the PCoIP portals can do IPTV
 
dbwillis said:
Your going to need a pretty hefty server to run 44 virtual machines, with each streaming video.
I dont know if the PCoIP portals can do IPTV
Click to expand...

I was assuming he was running tv as an "app" on the VM, so it would be just like using WMP or VLC in a pcoip session. can't say I know much about iptv though
 
thats right iptv run as an app with vlc. kind of "vlc stream ip_address"
yes we r going to get powerful server. any advice of what specs of server can do that without any problem.
 
by the way did somebody tried to run vlc with some hd movie or dvd in pcoip session how it look like?
 
playing the HD movie is going to be dependent on the VM, the PCoIP doesnt encode the movie, just encodes the full stream of everything.
I measured 2x 1280x1024 monitors watching Cisco IPTV in full screen pulling 90mb,so maybe 50 for one monitor/tv, times 44 rooms, your going to need a fast network as well maybe
 
I've seen demo's, but they are usually using blade pc's, so not backed with vmware. being that pcoip is just a transport technology, if you can do it in the vm itself through a console session, you should be bale to do it with pcoip. just need processing power, won't use the graphics card of the physical esx host. just make sure your thin client can drive whatever display device you plan to use at a decent frame rate.
 
thanks for advices;)
we gonna use 1 cisco 2960g switch. all 48 ports are gigabits.
all 44 thin clients will be connected to this switch.
44 rooms * 50mbs= 2200mbs
so if all guests starts to watch tv we need another switch.
means our cisco switch is capable to serve only 20 guest rooms.
then we need to buy 10g switch like hp 2910al-48g.
this is good advice for me;)

about thin clients what do u think aboyt wyse p20? i dont think they have graphic card itself. if it is not good to use graphic card on esx server who will render the image for 44 simulatenues tv!

also plzz what approximate spec of server i neeed
 
yes we will buy network card 10g for server.
just dont have any imagination of server specs we want
 
That switch should be able to push far more than 2200mbit, infact it SHOULD be able to do a gigabit on each port, so there wont be a bottleneck there, but you may need a few NIC's in the server or a 10gb nic (if that switch has a 10gb port)
 
thats right server will have 10g nic. it will be connected to switch 10g as well.
gigabit output for each port is too much as long as 10g uplink that means each port can do more than 200mbs that is more than enough for each pcoip session.
 
any thoughts of what specs of server i need to do this task?
task is to run simultaneusly 44 vmware virtual desktops on lan with pcoip sessions.
each session will be fully graphicaly loaded by iptv or hd movies streams.
 
I'm curious to see an update myself, as we're going have to do something like this on a global scale.

I'm a VMware zealot but you should also look into Citrix Xen App for your virtual desktops. Citrix has better performance over PCOIP, especially multimedia apps. and has been in the game longer for desktop thin apps. Now this may have changed with VMware's View latest release, but it remains to be tested. I'm just saying research the options, and test it at least on a small scale with the free/limited trial versions.

Todays mini-ITX/Pico passive cooled solutions are really nice. I don't think you're going to have cooling problems with modern hardware. It's not like you have to maintain a complex image either, if you get a virus, swap out the hard drive/small SSD/USB media that your OS is installed with, with one from your pre-imaged stock. There's also Windows Steadystate type solutions if running VM directly on the desktop/terminal isn't viable. If you're open source savvy, alot of hotels I've been in are using it in their lobbies.

Have you tried schmoozing with the IT at one of the larger hotel chains? They've already figured this out and run into the same issues most likely.
 
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you are going to need a monster server. BTW do you have a SAN for this (highly recommended!!!)??
for server specs i would plan on doing at least 1GB ram to each virtual desktop (in this case maybe 2GB since its video streaming). That puts us at 88GB (even though alot of it will be shared at the hypervisor level). So I would go with a server that can do at least 96GB of RAM, if you can get two of them if it is really important to always have this up (although i doubt this in your case). CPU is easy, dual 6 core processors (the fastest you can afford). For storage if you are not going to use a SAN i would get at least 6 drives (or more) at 15K RPM for the IOPS load(????), this last one is a big unknown can you run perfmon and get some iops figures off an existing machine doing the video stream? Network will be probably 10Gig DA nic, using DA cables.

I am partial to dell so a Dell R710 with the above specs would fit the bill.
 
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