We use Sun Ray 2 thin clients in our two teaching labs (60 seats total)
plus a few miscellaneous places in the department. Users login to a
Gnome desktop and if they need a Windows application they click on an
icon that launches an rdesktop connection to a Windows Terminal Server.
We have run into a number of issues with this setup
1. USB performance is poor and there are problems getting large USB
sticks to mount. We do have a workaround for the mount problem (a
desktop icon that reruns the mount request).
2. The most widely used application is only available for Windows so a
significant percentage of our logins immediately connect to a
Windows terminal server after logging in. Running these users
through a Linux Gnome session is just an extra complication.
3. We used to license SAS for Linux but the Linux version is not
current with the Windows version. The most notable irritant is that
it has line oriented editor which is rather antiquated and something
very few of our students would have had previous experience with.
We therefore switched to licensing it for our Windows Terminal
Servers thereby further increasing the number of sessions that
immediately head over to the Windows Terminal Servers.
4. Software vendors quite often charge significantly more for a server
or network based license than they do for say 30 individual desktop
pc licenses. This has prevented us from using a software package
that one of the departments we teach for would have preferred and
greatly increases the cost for some of the software we do have licensed.
5. Our vendor relationship really went downhill after the acquisition
of Sun by Oracle.
Other thin client solutions or VDI solutions don't make sense for the
number of desktops we have so we plan to convert one of our two labs
back to desktop pc's. The machines would be integrated into the Active
Directory domain maintained by our central computing department and run
a standard student image with the addition of applications unique to our
department. As the central computing department has the tools and
expertise to manage large numbers of pc's, the lab would be very easy
for us to manage.
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