Tips for setting up a zero client network

[armin.e]

Greetings, I'm a first-time poster here.

 

My organization has assigned me the task of setting up 16 zero clients and a VMware Horizon server. The users are going to use CPU/GPU intensive apps (like Adobe Photoshop). The problem is, I have no idea how to pick the right server to handle the load, and also how to setup the physical network in a way that users don't experience any lag/delays. I would appreciate more experienced sysadmin's tips on how to setup this environment. 

 

Thank you all in advance 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Whats the budget?

 

Why do the want zero clients? Workstations are normally cheaper and preform better.

 

Id probably hire someone that knows what their doing hrer.

[jaslion]

This setup is normally used for very light applications not things like photoshop. Your organization would be far better of with just individual workstations than trying to get this set up. It also should be cheaper.

 

A quick breakdown of what photoshop needs at the minimum to function ok:

 

8gb of ram

A quad core cpu with strong single core performance

A gpu that has gpu acceleration (a virtualized one is not ok)

 

So basically some i3 dell sff systems for around 800$ each.

 

With a zero client setup well it's gonna cost you at least 450$ to get good enough clients and then you have to get a beast of a server. So it will be a lot more expensive. Not even considering the network equipment needed if it isn't already in place. All for a well worse solution.

 

[wseaton]

I've set up VDI / Horizons in the past and you would have to point a gun to my head and threaten my job to even think of installing Photoshop on a VDI image. It sucks enough on Citrix / RDS.

 

Photoshop and bitmap image editors in general are disgustingly RAM intensive. Each undo layer gobbles up more and more RAM, and RAM is the most expensive component on VDI or even server virtualization. It's as bad as trying to do video editing on VDI. You are taking up big chunks of expensive server memory when somebody changes a pixel.

 

Also, VDI doesn't become cost effective until you hit at least 50 seats or more, and this assumes you have light duty clients that can happily sit in 4-8Gb sessions without a whole lot of ballooning.  At least with SQL and Exchange servers you can play around with memory reservations and not cut into performance much and fake out their near bottomless memory reservation requirements. Doesn't work the same with VDI and memory hogs like Photoshop or video editing. Once memory is committed it's done.

 

I can get nice i7 refurbs jacked up with RAM for far less than even a test deployment of Horizons for a Photoshop work. Sorry, but this is a poster child example of VDI being a square hole for a round peg.