Ken Mandelberg writes: So is there a Sunray server that would give faster desktop performance? Would an AMD/Intel server give faster Sunray desktops?
Yes, at least compared to a V440 with 1.2GHz processors, the Sun X4200 (Opteron) has better "desktop experience". However, you've nicely summarized the difficulties choosing a replacement for our SPARC Ray server. Our compromise was to add a Linux/x86 (and also our Solaris/SPARC) system to run apps that are not available or difficult to build on Solaris/x86. Making apps (e.g., matlab, acrobat reader) launch from the Ray server auto-magically on the other machines is not completely trivial. Matlab and maple are examples that require special hacks to launch across a ssh connection. Also, users expect "acroread myfile" to work regardless where "myfile" lives. For temporary files created while browsing, it's easy to tell firefox to place on a shared filesystem, but it's one more issue. A headache we have not solved is when "myfile" lives on a Ray-connected USB mass storage device. A show-stopper may be sound-related apps such as the flashplayer. Unless there is extra magic, such apps must run on the Ray server. Adobe has released a recent version for Solaris/x86, but Linux versions tend to be first or only. I realize I haven't answered your question. Like you, the reports on this list leave me skeptical about running Rays on Linux. Sun's "containers for Linux" (brandz) may eventually help for apps such as matlab, but it is not production yet. We really like the Sun X4200 and Solaris/x86, and it has been a very nice upgrade for apps such as the symbolic algebra package "magma". However, we have only 10 Rays and we use only the basic non-smartcard login. It may be that our SPARC Ray server had less degradation as load increases, although this is from superficial comparison. -- --Darrel Hankerson _______________________________________________ SunRay-Users mailing list [email protected] http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users
