[THIN] Re: thin client deployment in a school

  • From: Christoph Wegener <cwegener@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 22:13:04 +1100

Hi Puneet,

Here are my quick thoughts:
Looking at the applications you listed, it would be recommended to have the applications executing on the desktop hardware rather than on a Terminal Server/XenApp Server. Products like XenDesktop and Provisioning Server from Citrix might be applicable in this scenario to reduce TCO. Especially Autocad will prevent you from deploying a Terminal Server solution as Autodesk prohibits by its EULA to run its Software on a Terminal Server. With the latest releases of AutoCAD you will not even be able to run the installer on a Terminal Server.

Citrix Provisioning Server can help you reduce TCO by having a single OS image for all desktops. So there is no need to patch 150 desktop separately. Adding application virtualization to the mix will allow you to dynamically compose your desktop images on the fly. This of course requires that all the applications you listed are compatible with application virtualization. But as there are multiple competing vendors (Microsoft,Citrix,VMware,Symantec) in the application virtualization space, chances are high that you might find one or more products which will enable this scenario for you.

If you still want to use a Terminal Server scenario, then you should do a thorough analysis of the computing resources that all of your application requires. This then gives you an idea about the scalability and efficiency of your targeted architecture. I would assume that applications like Photoshop may require huge amounts of RAM for each user session. Therefore a worst case scenario could be that you can only support about 5-10 Photoshop user sessions on a single Windows 2003 Terminal Server instance. To maximize efficient use of hardware scalability you could then look at running multiple virtual OS instances on a single server with say 32Gb RAM to pack 40-80 Photoshop user sessions on a single physical server box.

Additionally, if the students are going to use the 3D modeling features of some of the applications, then the currently available server CPUs won't be sufficient and you might want to look at an external GPU. Citrix Systems has a Technology Preview of it's project Apollo available which is targeted at delivering 3D applications via ICA:
https://www.citrix.com/English/ss/downloads/details.asp?downloadId=1340963&productId=163057

Hope this helps :)

Christoph

On Mar 5, 2009, at 8:36 PM, Puneet Goel wrote:

Hi,

I have to deply thin client in a school for around 150 students. They
will be working on advanced IT apps like 3D Max, Maya, Autocad,
Photoshop, Oracle, SQL.

can anyone guide me in finalizing server requirements for them.

thanks
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