Thin Clients

[Creekwater X]

Doing some experiments with my server room and was wondering if I could use old computers as test thin clients. Don't know the first thing about it so if anyone has any recommendations on how to best implement it if it is even possible to convert a computer to a thin client it would be much appreciated.

[Pixel5]

which system do you use for your thin clients?

 

whatever you use will have requirements on what the thinclient needs to have and this will also decide about the software you need to put on the thinclient.

 

our company uses citrix but we are phasing it out as the idea of thinclients is outdated and there is no place for them anymore.

[NelizMastr]

A Thin Client in the sense of a terminal that connects to a central computing node mostly needs software to make that connection, a network connection and peripherals (kb, mouse, monitor).

 

Which software you'll need to make that connection depends on the central node. If it's running Linux (with GUI), you'll need a VNC solution. If it runs Windows Server with Remote Desktop Services, you'll only need the Terminal Server Client (mstsc.exe) included with any Windows version since XP. Citrix needs the Citrix Receiver.

 

What kind of hardware are we talking here?

 

 

[Creekwater X]

On 12/27/2017 at 5:48 AM, Pixel5 said:

which system do you use for your thin clients?

 

whatever you use will have requirements on what the thinclient needs to have and this will also decide about the software you need to put on the thinclient.

 

our company uses citrix but we are phasing it out as the idea of thinclients is outdated and there is no place for them anymore.

I don't really know what software to use for hardware I have HP ML370 G4 and a IBM x3850 M2 with a total of about 150 Gigs of Ram and plan on picking up the thin clients themselves on eBay cheap.

[Creekwater X]

Is there open source/free thin client software?

 

[Mikensan]

You could just install Windows and install whatever client you need to access your VDI. If vmware you'd install the Horizon client, if Citrix you'd install the Citrix Receiver. RDP? Well it's windows already so.... Done. 

 

You could run a linux distro such as ThinOS - which you can boot from a flash drive or CD. It supports about everything under the sun. HDX/ICA/RDP/PCoIP/Blast whatever.

I think citrix has a strong lead on web-based desktops and applications, but vmware works so damn well for thinclients/zeroclients.

 

You could buy a thin client, just be sure it will be compatible with whatever VDI you chose. Are firmware updates still released? Do they support your version of Horizon for example? I'm running 7.3 which is not compatible with zeroclients running Tera1.

 

Hardware really only offers you lower electricity bills over a desktop, but you'll wish you had a desktop when you start trying to watch 1080p movies etc...

 

Little off topic:

Thin clients are so damn expensive you could get a simple SFF desktop for the same price. So the only benefit of going VDI is security and endpoint management. Much easier to patch 1 image and deploy it to a pool than patching 200 desktops and praying you get them all. Security wise you can very easily control what comes/goes from your network. Somebody steals a thin client - they got nothing. PC? Yes you can still somewhat restrict it but even things like %appdata% users still have write access too, outlook temp files get stored locally - roaming profiles cache locally - lot of data resides client-side.

[Jay Deah]

any solution like this be it VDI / Citrix / TermServices etc. will be expensive, even if you dont yet realise it, even the licenses are $$$. Its basically a trade off of investing in lots of server computer and little in desktop computer.

 

ive worked in many organisations of many different sizes and ive never actually come up with a use case where VDI makes sense! Infact the one deployment i did of a contact center with 200-300 thin clients we ended up ripping them all out a week before go-live and replacing with SFF-DESKTOPS when they realised the solution wouldnt work! (this was web based stuff not RDP/VDI tho, their "thin web app" turned out to be a huge java app that was run via a web page.. lol)

[chiller15]

I manged something like this in a school I used to work in back in 2011. We had a couple of TS servers and a whole bunch of old Fujitsu machines. The machines were running Windows XP at the time and I created basic local accounts and enabled auto login. I created a RDP file with the details of the TS server and copied it to the local machine. I also replaced the startup key for explorer.exe with the RDP file (so that explorer wouldn't launch but remote desktop would instead). I also created a VBS script which ran in a loop every 15 seconds to check that mstsc.exe was running. If it wasn't, it would open it. I further used GPO and other solutions to rescrict the usage of the machine so that nothing else could be used (such as task manager, certain keyboard shortcuts, etc).

 

We calculated that each ICT suite of about 30 machines was maxing out one of our TS servers. Luckily we only needed a couple and we were covered by our Microsoft EES licensing. The main issue that we encountered was when a user loaded anything flash related, be it an advert, video or game. The flash content would absolutely destroy the CPU usage. I did start looking into a HP solution that would redirect the flash content to the local machine to be rendered there, but I left that job before I could get it working.