Testing ThinClients

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wavewerx

Limp Gawd
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Oct 8, 2008
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I hope this is the right section or pertains to this section enough....

I'm getting ready to get a enduser to test a Wyse thin client and I'd like some kind of evaluation form that they can fill out at the end of each day about how their experience was. They'll be testing it for 4 - 6 days and it's only the first stage of testing. It'll have Office 2007 and our ERP software.

Any one have any templates for new introduction software / hardware evaluation or good questions I can ask to get feedback from a end user?

Thanks!
 
wavewerx said:
I hope this is the right section or pertains to this section enough....

I'm getting ready to get a enduser to test a Wyse thin client and I'd like some kind of evaluation form that they can fill out at the end of each day about how their experience was. They'll be testing it for 4 - 6 days and it's only the first stage of testing. It'll have Office 2007 and our ERP software.

Any one have any templates for new introduction software / hardware evaluation or good questions I can ask to get feedback from a end user?

Thanks!
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Are you pulling a terminal server session to it, what are you doing?
 
Thinclients are awesome. So much nicer for us admins. Good job! It's great for regular office/everyday users.

Which Wyse clients are you using? We moved from Wyse to HP thin clients.
 
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Speaking of thin clients, I am looking some some I can plug USB peripherals into, including storage and printers, and they just work server side.

Ideally, something that eill dump the user right to the server for them to put in their password.
 
sc0tty8 said:
Speaking of thin clients, I am looking some some I can plug USB peripherals into, including storage and printers, and they just work server side.

Ideally, something that eill dump the user right to the server for them to put in their password.
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The way we have it, we use the thin client's RDP to connect to our terminal server. They can plug in flash drives into their thin clients and access them. However for printers, we just use network printers that have drivers installed on the terminal servers. Not exactly what you're looking for I guess.
 
That's what we do. Of a place of 35 employee's we only have 7 real pcs for things that wouldn't working Citrix / terminal services.

We currently use WYSE v50l. They are linux based and ok at best. We had loads of issues with a couple of firmware versions and pretty much WYSE just denied it. Needless to say I would probably never buy them again.

I would like to add one bit of warning about WYSE. When it comes to their support, regional reps and the manager of the regional reps have fun. We spent 6 months trying to get the issue with our original batch of v50l's fixed and WYSE drug their feet the entire time. If you can make sure you check out HP/Neoware before committing to WYSE.
 
The one we're testing right now is the Wyse C90LE. I'd like to take more of a peek at other options before we sign off on them too. We have until Feb 22 before we lose our 30 trial. I'm working with our IT risk management firm to test run the clients here. They're hosting the Citrix farm and we've been giving them the software to install on it. Right now it's just our ERP. This is my introduction into Citrix and thinclients so I'm learning as I go.

So far I've had fun playing with the machine for the week. I'm working on a day to day write up of my experience with it. This is my first thin client and the first one most people here have seen.

Still looking for some good questions to bring up!

"What did you do today and how did it turn out? Did you have any trouble completing any tasks due to the new computer? How different was it from what you're used to? Did you have to use your desktop for anything today?"
 
I have one on my desk right now. I'm liking it, but still have the sour taste in my mouth about their service. Just hate to see anybody go through the 6 months of hell we did with them
 
Seriously the most amazing software for both discovering and measuring performance before / after desktop virtualization is LiquidWareLabs. The depth the analysis goes into is simply insane, all the way to network latencies for each individual application. This gives you a very powerful tool to prove what end user experience is before and after moving to thin clients which users can not give reliably.

Are you going to evaluate a VDI implementation, or just Terminal Server? LiquidWareLabs is more tuned for VDI, as they have special hooks to read into the hypervisor to get performance data.
 
Make sure to ask HP if you can demo their thin clients as well. I'm pretty sure they do almost the same things as the Wyse versions.

We've been using thin clients in our workplace for at least 8 years already. Only problem that arises is that video streaming blows. But our users have laptops that they can use if they really need to watch a video. If that is something your users will need to do often, then thin clients might not work so well. This is using RDP on them. We don't really use much of the other programs and features on the thin client. Just makes it so much easier to just manage a couple or more of Terminal Servers than everyone's personal box.

Wavewerx, how are you implementing the thin clients? Are you allowing users access to the whole thin client?
 
Oh yeah, and for thin clients, which I recently tested, 10Zig was the winner in my analysis. Linux and very easy to manage. Wyse charges additional fees for everything including software updates and the management setup is kinda awful with our network setup; the PXE imaging service would conflict with our existing PXE server, etc.
 
calvinj said:
I have one on my desk right now. I'm liking it, but still have the sour taste in my mouth about their service. Just hate to see anybody go through the 6 months of hell we did with them
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dude, you better not be bitching about the sunray I gave you! :p
 
NeoGohan said:
Wavewerx, how are you implementing the thin clients? Are you allowing users access to the whole thin client?
Click to expand...

Showing my ignorance, write protection will be ON on our thin clients. They'll save everything to our local domain controller / active directory server. Depending on how it goes, we may just move our servers over there to their location.

archivalbackup said:
Are you going to evaluate a VDI implementation, or just Terminal Server? LiquidWareLabs is more tuned for VDI, as they have special hooks to read into the hypervisor to get performance data.
Click to expand...

Again, that's a bit above my understanding right now... I'm thinking it's just a Terminal Sever connection.
 
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