Thanks Jeff, the idea of throttling the ports the thin-clients are connected to is a good one and one that I have not thought of. Most students I catch watching YouTube arent doing so in full screen but you never know.
The other issue is the CPU resources only because I'm sharing with other VM guests. Having the LTSP server on a VM host does give me the flexibility of deploying more LTSP servers and dividing users among them more easily - but would be ideal if I did not share the host CPU resources with other guests that are doing other non-LTSP things. Bare metal is more simple - but rebuilds or expansion is a bit more tricky - and less "green". I'm adding more users to my test VM LTSP server every day and I'm noticing most issues being with CPU intensive apps. Has anyone modified the links to apps in the Applications menu to launch applications on other servers? That would be ideal. --mike ________________________________________ From: Johan Kragsterman <johan.kragster...@capvert.se> Sent: Thursday, March 3, 2016 10:47 AM To: ltsp-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Ltsp-discuss] Ang: Re: VMware resource requirements for hosting thin clients? Hi! -----Jeff Siddall <n...@siddall.name> skrev: ----- Till: ltsp-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net Från: Jeff Siddall <n...@siddall.name> Datum: 2016-03-03 16:25 Ärende: Re: [Ltsp-discuss] VMware resource requirements for hosting thin clients? On 03/02/2016 03:00 PM, Mike Cammilleri wrote: > So LTSP memory/processing requirements can vary widely depending on your > environment and what your users are doing with it. I get that. But I was > wondering if someone really had a finer sense on what the requirements > are for the following situation. Sorry, but I don't have an answer for something of your scale. I run at most 30 concurrent users, many are kiosks and only get used intermittently. However, my modest 4 core CPU and 8 GB RAM server handles that easily. That said it doesn't take many runaway processes (Adobe and Mozilla I am looking at you) to suck up those 4 cores. Also of concern is the NIC. One full screen video stream can easily eat up 500+ Mbps so only two users watching videos means a saturated 1 Gbps NIC. Consider putting clients on throttled ports (ex: 10/100 Mbps ports) or going with 10 Gbps NICs or maybe just blocking access to obvious resource intensive sites. Audio is less bad but still significant as each stereo 48 kHz stream is a couple of Mbps. So under "normal" load you might get 100 users on a modest server, but you need to be very diligent about monitoring for resource hogs. > I think it comes down to which is a better scheduler? VMware or Ubuntu? > If VMware better utilizes the host resources for the LTSP Server VM and > the strain the clients put on it, then sure, maybe we'll dedicate one of > our VMware hosts just to this task. But if Ubuntu is a better resource > scheduler than VMware then might as well just stick with installing > Ubuntu directly on the machine and skip any virtualization. That one is easy: a hypervisor will never give you better performance than the bare metal server. Period. VMs are for flexibility not performance. If you don't need to easily move your LTSP server to different hardware, or share the host resources among multiple guests then you don't need a VM infrastructure. That said I am currently working on moving my LTSP server to a KVM guest primarily for reasons of resiliency. If I run into any issues I will simply put it back on bare metal. Jeff There is a huge difference in the requirements for the server between running fat or thin clients. I don't really see the meaning with running thin clients anymore, since the hardware that works splendid with fat clients getting so cheap. At home I run Ubuntu/LTSP as a KVM virtual machine on OmniOS(Illumos dist), which give me ZFS in the bottom. I do it for resiliency and manageability reasons, and because I like OmniOS, as well as I like to have a VM infrastructure at hand. I got a lot of other stuff running on that machine in zones or in VM's. If you run fat clients, you don't need to pass through the server, you don't even need it to deliver /home if you don't want, you can get that from another nfs server if you like. You can add your users from LDAP, either to the server or directly to your fat clients(with some hack). With fat clients you don't need to bother about any nic's, you just see to you got a backbone that support your needs. The fat client H/W I use is some asus mobo with a quad core celeron, and 8 GB ram in a very small chenbro chassi. Running 64-bit img. I believe costs/client is like $250. It is very fast and has excellent graphics! Lst time I rebooted the OmniOS server was about 6 months ago. The LTSP VM I rebooted about 2 months ago. 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To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Site24x7 APM Insight: Get Deep Visibility into Application Performance APM + Mobile APM + RUM: Monitor 3 App instances at just $35/Month Monitor end-to-end web transactions and take corrective actions now Troubleshoot faster and improve end-user experience. Signup Now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=272487151&iu=/4140 _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Transform Data into Opportunity. Accelerate data analysis in your applications with Intel Data Analytics Acceleration Library. Click to learn more. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=278785111&iu=/4140 _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
