When to use thin clients over PC?

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marley1

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I have a municipality that is spread over 4 buildings - Police, Court, Fire, and Village. We currently have a server/servers at each location handling the needs.

I am wondering when do you pick thin clients over full pc?

I would like to start virtualizing some of these buildings, and maybe it would make sense to put servers in one location, and have everything run over local or wan connect to remote desktop.

When do you chose between full pcs and thin clients?
 
tough call. A few things to consider:

you will not have a god capex argument for thin clients, savings is in opex

your significant opex savings will be in administrative time, not licensing or power costs

the reduction in admin time can result in rapid MTTR in even of a thin client failure, and quick provisioning of equipment for new employees, will your customer see this as worth the capex investment?
 
Can thin clients do anything with multimedia? Not really right? No youtube and such?
 
it depends, what sort of implementation are you considering? with PCOIP and doing VMware view, you can do multimedia, and if you go the microsoft route and use a terminal server and RDP, no it sucks, but I hear that if you do the hyper-v route and use clients that support RemoteFX multimedia is ok.
 
marley1 said:
I would like to start virtualizing some of these buildings, and maybe it would make sense to put servers in one location, and have everything run over local or wan connect to remote desktop.
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Look at how much bandwidth you will require and how much that will cost.
 
We are a MS shop and for costs MS seems to be cheaper than doing the VMWare.

But really just curious when you can pick a thin client over a desktop. Seems like for general office use it would be good but when you have to add any multimedia in you will have issues.
 
like I said, remoteFX or PCoIP take care of your multimedia concerns, it's really only heavy lifting tasks that will consume a lot of memory or precessor resources that would not be well suited to a thin client. think software development, multimedia editing, etc.
 
Will have to see if worth while to do it for these clients. Odd how thin clients are like $300-400
 
yea, there is realy no capex advantage to thin client computing over jsut buying everyone a cheap dell workstation. it's your opex where the savings come in, due to freeing up man hours. Being able to sjut quickly reprovision a new vm in a couple clicks, instead of fixing a pc is nice.
 
Something else to consider: how often does some numpty put a digger through cabling?
 
pretty simple to work in N+1 redundancy and distribute servers between sites, that being said, cable cuts might also take out your power, and your phones.
 
Berg0 said:
gonna have to call you on that, that's a beagle board, and they are $150 for a bare board. They are by no means a ready to go solution, they are a development platform.

http://beagleboard.org/
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was worth a shot, but actually digikey.ca sells them for cheap :)


I think a fx server would be $$$ to wouldn't it ? RAm cpu's Vid cards would be a beast and power hungry..
 
/usr/home said:
You'd make up for the server costs by having cheap low power clients.
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very true good point.

i think amd gamer was talking about this a whyle back building and playing with a box,

need 1-2 2+ gig video cards loads of ram and a nice 1000watt psu for 10-20 thin client sessions.
 
Choose thin clients when:

1. You want to lower TCO.
2. You like centralized management.
3. You're lazy and don't like to do maintenance much.
4. You like to have total control over clients on your network.

Just a few reasons.
 
Something else: do you have standardised client software? If everyone's got their own special setup, then thin clients aren't so effective.
 
4. You like to have total control over clients on your network.
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You dont need thin clients for this, or the others really, sure it is easier, but using GPO's PXE pre-made images and such can be done, but usually alot more work :d so not the lazy one.
 
Buy all the same hardware. We buy all off-lease Dells for 250 a pop. We have about 3 different models with 3 different XP images. (Only one once we roll out 7. Each different computer pulls drivers as it needs during the WDS imaging). All printers, mapped drives, settings, everything is GPOed. We also run Citrix for all of our apps. (Exluding Office which is on each PC.) Need to swap a workstation? Takes us about 10 minutes or less depending on if they need specialized local changes. For $250 we get usually a 2.33 Core2Duo with 4 GB of RAM, and a 160 GB HDD. We get the SFF type Optiplexes. Small enough to easily fit on a desk and still powerful enough to do more serious work.
 
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