Makes management simple and slightly more affordable when you need a lot of them. No graphics cards or good CPUs needed on the clients. They are just a remote display with inputs at that point. All the processing is happening on the servers. Instead of buying a $1200 dollar computer to last for 5 years, you buy zero clients for often less than $500 and when the operating system and applications get more demanding you don’t care on the clients, just the back end. Test environments are easier, swap outs are easier. From a management point of view it’s great. From the client user side though it gets limited when it comes to more demanding applications. Sure the graphics cards can perform the tasks needed for video editing, but uploading/downloading/editing videos that are stored on a cloud somewhere would just be a nightmare, so you’d need network storage locally, but even then it still isn’t going to be as useful as just performing it locally on a machine, and having a copy on an external you walk with.
For schools in Germany I believe the storage is usually in the same rack as the server the clients connect to for data protection reasons. There’s no reason you couldn’t do that elsewhere.
Scaling that doesn’t work, but local needs, for sure. It’s what people are fired and hired over every day. Ever told someone you’d lose 40 plus percent of speed (was really 90) but had to quit to speak. It happens daily.
Edit: maybe it doesn’t just work here… You know our environment
In bigish companies each department could have their own terminal server then transferring files between departments is still slow but it would be anyways. The only issue I could think of is input lag but nobody I know who is using a thin client has complained about that.
Our work tried to push thin clients. It didn’t go well because they did not invest in the back end and infrastructure to do it. Constantly unable to reach the server, often bogged down because three people were running heavy applications where they should have had a dedicated machine, the storage server was sometimes a microwave link away that would nearly die if it was raining.
I’m usually at three different workstations throughout the day, sometimes there’s even three others that I might end up at, and it was so nice to just connect to my instance and continue, nothing’s worse than opening up an excel you worked on for two hours at a workstation five minutes from your current one and it’s “locked by another user” and you don’t remember what all you might have changed from your last save.
I do not do any resource intensive work that isn’t on a dedicated machine, so I would be perfect for thin client use. But there were so many little things they didn’t or couldn’t do that built up to it being a useless endeavor.
Citrix does well in those situations. A standard virtual machine image set up for standard users and then seperate images for those that need other apps running off seperate hardware with dedicated GPUs. None of the data needs to pull to the device you are on, and no matter what machine you walk up to, even remotely at home you can access it without even needing a VPN but rather set it up using 2 factor on the login site where only single factor is needed when onsite. So no software is needed on any of the clients you log in from. And the “computer” you are signed into is located on the same network as where you use network drives so it works better than a VPN at accessing the data.
Someone hops on your machine when you went to lunch, hop on another and have it bring the same desktop you were using up, drive home, same desktop. If set up right it’s nice, if not… There is always struggles for people
Makes management simple and slightly more affordable when you need a lot of them. No graphics cards or good CPUs needed on the clients. They are just a remote display with inputs at that point. All the processing is happening on the servers. Instead of buying a $1200 dollar computer to last for 5 years, you buy zero clients for often less than $500 and when the operating system and applications get more demanding you don’t care on the clients, just the back end. Test environments are easier, swap outs are easier. From a management point of view it’s great. From the client user side though it gets limited when it comes to more demanding applications. Sure the graphics cards can perform the tasks needed for video editing, but uploading/downloading/editing videos that are stored on a cloud somewhere would just be a nightmare, so you’d need network storage locally, but even then it still isn’t going to be as useful as just performing it locally on a machine, and having a copy on an external you walk with.
For schools in Germany I believe the storage is usually in the same rack as the server the clients connect to for data protection reasons. There’s no reason you couldn’t do that elsewhere.
Scaling that doesn’t work, but local needs, for sure. It’s what people are fired and hired over every day. Ever told someone you’d lose 40 plus percent of speed (was really 90) but had to quit to speak. It happens daily.
Edit: maybe it doesn’t just work here… You know our environment
In bigish companies each department could have their own terminal server then transferring files between departments is still slow but it would be anyways. The only issue I could think of is input lag but nobody I know who is using a thin client has complained about that.
Our work tried to push thin clients. It didn’t go well because they did not invest in the back end and infrastructure to do it. Constantly unable to reach the server, often bogged down because three people were running heavy applications where they should have had a dedicated machine, the storage server was sometimes a microwave link away that would nearly die if it was raining.
I’m usually at three different workstations throughout the day, sometimes there’s even three others that I might end up at, and it was so nice to just connect to my instance and continue, nothing’s worse than opening up an excel you worked on for two hours at a workstation five minutes from your current one and it’s “locked by another user” and you don’t remember what all you might have changed from your last save.
I do not do any resource intensive work that isn’t on a dedicated machine, so I would be perfect for thin client use. But there were so many little things they didn’t or couldn’t do that built up to it being a useless endeavor.
Citrix does well in those situations. A standard virtual machine image set up for standard users and then seperate images for those that need other apps running off seperate hardware with dedicated GPUs. None of the data needs to pull to the device you are on, and no matter what machine you walk up to, even remotely at home you can access it without even needing a VPN but rather set it up using 2 factor on the login site where only single factor is needed when onsite. So no software is needed on any of the clients you log in from. And the “computer” you are signed into is located on the same network as where you use network drives so it works better than a VPN at accessing the data.
Someone hops on your machine when you went to lunch, hop on another and have it bring the same desktop you were using up, drive home, same desktop. If set up right it’s nice, if not… There is always struggles for people