thin or zero clients recommendation for horizon 6?

kalex1114

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 14, 2013
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126
Helo

I have a question. We are looking to provide 30 vdis to a client and for ease of use we are looking to deploy thin clients at the site. They will be connecting to our horizon 6 view environment at our datacenter.
Setup will be fairly simple. Internet browsing, Office, some sort of drawing applications, nothing too heavy. Single monitor setups. Printing will be local on site.

What would u recommend as far as which model of thin or zero clients to get? I have never dealt with them before. Looking for something affordable and stable that will work. Wired and wireless ability preferred. We might have to deploy these wirelessly because of the way its setup


Thanks


Alex
 
Alex,

Having been in the same boat some time ago I'll share my thoughts. First I would contact several companies such as Dell, HP, 10zig, EVGA, Samsung, etc to have them each send you several units to demo. In most cases they are typically very happy to let you try their hardware.

Second would be how do you plan on connecting to these VDI's? PCoIP, RDP? Also will these devices be used to connect to other than the VDI environment and do you really need a OS installed on the devices (as a thin client has)?

In the past few years I've demoed Dell (WYSE), EVGA, 10zig, and HP. We started with HP thin clients (linux based), they were decent but seemed a bit slow from time to time. The control panel from HP was okay but rather clunky and slow in my opinion but the thing that really bothered me about HP thin clients (and possibly other thin clients) is I was at the mercy of HP in regards as to when I could upgrade View / Horizon as you can't just go and download a new client for the thin client so you had to wait until HP released one. This could take a few months to several months and if you have a model that's being phased out, then good luck to you.

Finally convinced management to consider zero clients and was able to demo WYSE, EVGA, and 10zig zero clients. if I recall correctly the underlining hardware for all of the zero clients are identical the biggest difference between them is support and price. That said I was very much impressed with 10zig. We demoed them at the start before going with HP thin clients and 10zig was extremely helpful and was always quick to fix any issues we might have ran into. So I was pretty excited to try their zero clients a second time around.

They (zero clients) are fast, the management server is a breeze to setup and configure, and since there is no OS there is no client to install meaning I could upgrade to the latest View/Horizon version as soon as it came out as zero clients use firmware to talk directly via PCoIP.

If you don't need an OS on the device, don't need to connect to a bunch of different protocols, and only plan on using this for a PCoIP VDI environment I would without a doubt suggest a Zero Client and most certainly consider checking out 10zig. Otherwise you're going to have to go with a thin client and find one that suits your needs the best.

Keep us posted which route you go with.
 
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