On 10/01/2014 01:17 PM, Steven Gelsie wrote:
I was wondering what sunray users are planning once Oracle stops support
on the sunrays. Do you plan to find a sunray replacement ?
Both of our teaching labs which are primarily used for our statistics
courses were equipped with Sun Ray devices. It had seemed quite
promising when we converted the first lab to Sun Ray devices six years.
However things changed...
* almost all our courses now use Windows based applications so there
wasn't much point in first dropping them into a Linux Gnome session.
* SAS licensing was expensive as we needed our own Windows Terminal
Server type license instead of being able to use individual pc
licensing which the university was already paying for.
* USB flash drive performance was poor and it was hard to get the
system to recognize large capacity flash drives (who is carrying
around a 1GB flash drive these days?).
* Oracle wanted us to pay a yearly software maintenance fee for each
Sun Ray to be able to receive updates to the Sun Ray software.
* Oracle announced there would be no further development of the Sun
Ray technology.
Last year we reverted to using pc's in one of the labs. As we had no
budget we had to use machines that our central computing department had
taken out of service. The difficulty of managing a pc lab had been one
of the reasons for the switch to Sun Ray devices but this time we opted
to use a slightly modified student image provided by our central
computing department. SCCM is used to image the machines and push out
changes so the management tasks are largely taken care of for us.
This September we've gone with a Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI)
solution in our remaining Sun Ray lab. We are using Dell Wyse P25 Zero
Clients so we have many of the advantages of the Sun Ray's -- low power
consumption, reliability and no noise. USB flash drive performance is
good and logins are quick. I haven't seen any operational problems at
all and the folks at the server end tell us that they are not seeing any
noticeable increase in the load on their servers when a class is
running. Unless something totally unexpected happens in the next few
weeks, I expect we'll convert the pc lab over to Zero Clients in December.
Our Physics department plan to continue operating a Sun Ray teaching
lab. That's fine with us as it gives us a place for instructors who
want a Linux based environment for their course.
--
John Stewart -- Faculty of Science, Carleton University
Internet:john.stew...@carleton.ca 613-520-2600x3707
"Good judgement comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgement."
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