Search results matching tag 'Thin Client Hardware'

Details about Microsoft Calista start to emerge, but much is still unknown

Brian Madden — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:34:00 GMT

It's been almost a year since Microsoft bought Calista Technologies, a non-shipping set of technologies that leverages host and client-based GPUs for 3D and multimedia remoting. Since the acquisition, Microsoft has been mum about the technology. Nevertheless, we've still learned a few things about it over the past year. So of the Microsoft folks at BriForum talked a bit about it, Tad Brockway posted a blog entry about it earlier this week, Microsoft demoed a Calista preview at WinHEC last week, and there's this obscure Yahoo video demoing it.

So what do we know about Calista?

The Calista team is in the Bay Area, being led by Tad Brockway. Tad moved down there from Seattle, where he worked with the Terminal Services group for years. (Many of you remember Tad from his BriForum 2006 presentation about how Terminal Services came to be.)
Calista is specifically meant to help with 3D and multimedia applications. It does that by leveraging the GPU running on the host and the client.
Microsoft has NOT announced the "delivery vehicle" for Calista. In other words, we don't know when it's coming out. Tad's post had a sentence which read "When we launch RDS (Remote Desktop Services) in Server 2008 R2, and eventually Calista..." So we can guess Calista will be after R2.
The Calista demos at WinHEC were running on Windows 7 preview code running Hyper-V preview code. We don't know if Calista will specifically require Hyper-V on the host.
In the past, the talk was that Calista required a real Windows OS running on a real computer. But one of the Calista demos at WinHEC used a prototype thin client device. We can assume this device had a full GPU.
Server 2008 R2 will have many new RDP features, including "real" multi-monitor support, a connection broker that can be used for VDI or TS/RDS sessions, and DirectX remoting. These are all separate from Calista.

The more I learn about Calista, the more it seems that it's a bit like Teradici, except that Calista is based on existing GPU chips, whereas Teradici has their own. Of course Teradici does the whole DVI signal, not just 3D and multimedia, and Teradici also handles client-side USB and security and stuff... but as far as a general concept of leverage host and client-based special chips, these two seem similar.

Now that I'm living in the Bay Area, I'm hoping to visit the Microsoft office where Calista is being developed to record some videos of it in action. (Oh, by the way, I moved to San Francisco.) Until then, if anyone has any more information or video links, please post them. Calista can potentially fulfill one of the four technical needs for the "VDI+ 2010 vision," so I'm very interested in watching it evolve.

Sun Rays get a firmware upgrade for better video performance. Wait... what?

Brian Madden — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

InternetWeek reported a few weeks ago that new firmware for Sun Ray clients is available, and that one of the key new features is multimedia redirection. This is funny because I thought the whole point of Sun Rays was they were so thin? Check out this quote:

The Sun Ray line is a truly "thin" client that relies primarily on the server for processing, where competitors such as HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Wyse offer beefed up "chubby" clients that include PC and graphics chips to handle more of the processing locally.

The whole point of the article is talking about how thin they can make it, but then they talk about this whole multimedia redirection thing. I'm so confused!

I guess this goes back to my bigger-picture confusion about the value of a Sun Ray. It seems to me that these devices are more complex than traditional thin clients, because you need your Sun Ray server to power them all. (And I think that's how they can call them "true" thin clients, because a lot of the traditional thin client computing is on that Sun Ray server instead of on the client.) But if you just want to conenct into a Windows environment, now you need a Terminal Server, a Sun Ray server, and a Sun Ray.

So let me ask the broader question. Who out there is using Sun Rays, and why?

Dell's new thin client: jack of all trades, master of none?

Brian Madden — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Behold the Dell Optiplex FX160:

Yesterday Dell announced their "flex client" series of desktop devices. This is basically a super-small Optiplex-branded client based on Intel's Atom processor. So what is it? A thin client? A desktop PC? A locked-down PC? A desktop appliance?

Yes.

This single client device model can be used in many ways, such as:

Running Windows XP Embedded or embedded Linux, like a traditional thin client device.
Receiving a streamed OS (like from Citrix Provisioning Server)
With a hard drive and an old-fashioned copy of Windows XP or Vista installed and running locally
Any combination(s) of the above

The idea is that you buy this single model for all your users, and then you can deploy or configure (now or later) the thing exactly how you need it, when you need it. All of these devices use the tiny Atom processor which consumes less than 3 watts. (A typical Intel Core 2 Duo mobile processor consumes around 35 watts.)

Pricing varies based on the exact configuration you choose at purchase time. A few examples (in $US Dollars):

512MB RAM, 512MB Flash NVRAM, SUSE Linux Embedded: $399
1GB RAM, 1GB Flash NVRAM, Windows XP Embedded: $529
1GB RAM, 80GB hard drive, Windows Vista Business, Citrix Provisioning Server CAL w/ SA: $807
All with Intel Atom 230 processor, Intel SIS Mirage 3 graphics, no monitor

Is this something that people want?

Now that Dell's released this, how important is it to you? Would you pay $399 for a thin client that you can upgrade to real windows later on? Or would you pay $800 for a Windows PC that you can downgrade to a thin client later on? (And with things like Windows Fundamentals and Thin Launch and stuff, why not just buy a $300 PC and downgrade it later? Will you ever make up the power consumption cost savings?)

What scares me the most is the processor. Windows Vista is not exactly screaming fast to begin with. And that Atom processor Dell chose is benchmarking slower than a 900Mhz Celeron processor. Based on that, I can't possibly see anyone running Vista or XP (Embedded or local) on these things. Maybe when the dual-core Atoms come out next year this will be interesting. But if you ask me, what you have right now from Dell is yet another thin client.

The other real downside to these is that Dell talks about a 3-year replacement cycle. So you get the cost and lifecycle of the PC, with the performance of a thin client.

What do you think? How important is it to you that you have flexibility in your device? Could you imagine using something like this? (Forget about "Dell," per se. Could you imagine this concept in your environment at all?)

Thin Client CPU utilization with Published Applications

embrown — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:29:30 GMT

Running Wyse V90LE thin clients, Windows XPembedded SP2 with Client 10.1. Accessing published applications via PNAgent on PS/XenApp 4.5 servers. When client connects, and as long as session is open, the CPU utilization on the the client is at 70% or higher. Causes local IE applications to really drag, especially if they use Java.
Saw an earlier Citrix article regarding re-directed COM ports, and how to edit the Module.ini, but I don't have the COM ports enabled, and the segments don't appear in the ini file.

Any Thoughts?

A deeper look at VMware's upcoming bare-metal client hypervisor

Brian Madden — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 08:02:06 GMT

At VMworld last month, VMware announced several future capabilities of their VDI product, including a bare-metal client-side hypervisor. The idea behind this is that if you have a hypervisor running locally on a client device, you can get the "best of both worlds," combining the centralized management of VDI and performance and flexibility of local compting. Having a local / offline capability will be an important feature of future VDI environments. (Check out Recommendation #3 in the 2010 VDI+ vision blog post.)

There are several advantages to running a hypervisor on a client device:

The hypervisor provides generic hardware to the VM, so a single disk image can be used on very different types of devices.
Since the VM is running locally, it works offline, and you don't have to worry about thin client remote display protocols.

Of course products like VMware ACE and Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (Kidaro) have allowed users to run VMs on their clients for years. But those products were "Type 2" hypervisors, (or Virtual Machine Monitors), which installed on top of an existing OS like a regular application. VMware announced that they will release something that's more like a "Type 1" hypervisor, where the hypervisor itself is the actual OS (like ESX Server). Type 1 hypervisors are typically viewed as having better performance and just being more of a "real" solution in general. On the server side, Type 1 hypervisors are absolutely dominating the market. On the client side, however, there aren't any Type 1 hypervisors in use.

Why would you want a Type 1 hypervisor on a client?

VDI is all about management, especially when you're talking about client-based VDI. Everyone reading this can understand the value proposition of being able to create a single disk image that could be used by multiple users. And everyone reading this can understand that use cases exist where you'd want the disk image to run locally on a client device. So how can we combine these two?

Citrix Provisioning Server (Ardence) showed a lot of early promise. With Provisioning Server, you can create a single disk image that's shared by hundreds or even thousands of users. This works perfectly as long as the client devices that you're deploying this image to are identical. (Or at least identical enough to use the same image.) But what if you have a several different types of client devices? This means that you need to build several different images, and it means that you won't be able to support any random client device.

"No problem," people think, "We'll just throw a hypervisor on the client devices and use Provisioning Server with a VM on the client instead of the bare-metal client." While this is a simple theory, it's not so easy in practice. Existing Type 2 client-based hypervisors require an underlying base OS. So how do you manage, deploy, maintain, and patch that OS? And if you're taking the time to manage that, then why even bother with the VDI instance? If you think about it, managing a local OS on a client device while also managing a VDI OS is actually the worst of both worlds. Now you're managing two OSes per user instead of one.

This is the exact problem that a Type 1 bare-metal client hypervisor can solve. In this scenario, there's only one OS to manage. (This is the point at which purists shout, "Hey! The Type 1 hypervisor is an OS, so you're still managing two OSes." I guess that's technically true, but the Type 1 hypervisor is much easier to manage than a "real" OS, and the general idea is that it would be transparent. Even though a Type 1 hypervisor is technically a piece of software, it can be managed as if it's an extension of hardware.

It's probably worth mentioning that Type 2 client hypervisors will continue to exist even once Type 1 hypervisors for client devices are released, because each type has its own use case. Type 1 hypervisors are great for when you want to "replace" (or provide the only OS) that's used on a client. They're great for when you want a user to turn on a machine and only see a single OS that looks and feels local.

Type 2 hypervisors are (and will continue to be) great when you want a user to have access to their own local desktop OS in addition to the centrally-managed corporate VDI OS. This could be for an employee-owned PC scenario, or it could be a situation where you have contractors, etc., who need access to their stuff and your stuff.

Perhaps some day will see a hybrid hypervisor that combines the best of Type 1 and Type hypervisors. Maybe you could have a Type 1 hypervisor that boots a disk image from a USB stick, but that can also (at the same time) boot the contents of the client's physical hard drive into a second VM which is then accessed from within the first primary VM. Sound tricky? Maybe, but VMware is already doing something similar with their Fusion product. (Fusion is like VMware Workstation for Mac.) Since Macs can run Windows now, a lot of people use something called "Boot Camp" to configure their Macs to be able to dual boot between Windows and Mac. With the new version of Fusion, you can boot to the Mac OS, run Fusion, and then boot up your Windows partition live in a VM while running the Mac OS. (And this is non-destructive. You can still then reboot your Mac and boot into the Windows partition natively.)

Challenges of Type 1 client hypervisors

There's a reason that Type 1 hypervisors have existed for five years in the datacenter while they're only just now coming out for client devices, and that's because building a Type 1 client hypervisor is actually really hard! It's not as simple as just installing a server hypervisor on a laptop. A Type 1 hypervisor running on a server is built to host multiple VMs, and the design goals center around making each VM seem like a "real" server on the network. A client-side Type 1 hypervisor would have a completely different goal, mainly, that the VM running on the client should "feel" like a normal local computer. In fact, the user probably shouldn't even know that a hypervisor is there or that they're running a VM.

That said, consider the following challenges that a Type 1 hypervisor running on a client device would face:

Hardware compatibility. In the grand scheme of things, there aren't that many different server models in the world. Since a Type 1 hypervisor is the actual OS, it needs to support (with drivers, etc.) whatever hardware it's installed on. And there are probably, what, 50-times more laptop and desktop models in the world than servers?
Local graphical performance is important on a client device, so the hypervisor needs to make sure it exposes the local GPU and graphics capabilities to the VM.
If the client device is a laptop, then the VM running needs to know that it's a laptop. This means that the hypervisor needs to expose the battery and power states to the VM, it needs to expose the power savings and CPU speed stepping technology, and it needs to expose the suspend / resume / hybernate states.
USB ports and devices must be passed-through perfectly to guest VM.

VMware' client hypervisor plans

Taking all that into consideration, VMware announced that they would release a "bare metal" hypervisor for client devices. At this point we don't have a ton of details, but between the press release, the onsite VMworld lab, and talking to VMware employees, I think we can get a pretty good sense of what they want to do. This is part of their larger "vClient" initiative, which is their marketing way of talking about how a user's desktop could follow them to any location.

The most important point about VMware's client hypervisor is what it's not. VMware's client hypervisor is not some sort of "ESX for desktops." ESX has been designed, built, and refined to be a server hypervisor, and the specific requirements of a client-based hypervisor are completely different. (Think "graphic performance" versus "network performance," etc.) Sure, there are elements and know-how in ESX that can be used as a foundation for a client-side hypervisor, but it's not a straight port of the product.

In addition to ESX, VMware was also able to draw from products like ACE (a centrally-managed Type 2 hypervisor) and VMware Workstation when designing the client hypervisor.

From a pure technical standpoint, it appears that VMware's client hypervisor will be something like VMware workstation for Linux running on some version of Linux with the central management of something like ACE. I asked some folks from the desktop team point-blank whether their client hypervisor was really a Type 1 hypervisor, or a Type 2 hypervisor running on Linux, and they did admit that they built it on are Linux capabilities, but they stressed that they want to downplay that.

They don't really want to mention that it's a hypervisor running on Linux because they don't want people to think that it will be a big problem, or that you have to install Linux first and then install their hypervisor. They want people to know that it's a single "thing" you install, and whether or not that thing includes some Linux code shouldn't matter to the user.

On a side note, while I agree with this 100%, I think it's ironic that VMware attacks KVM by saying that since it runs on Linux, it's extra complex and you need to install Linux first, and now all of the sudden that they have a solution like this, they hide it and say it's no problem. Because with KVM, it's also no problem. You pop in the DVD and follow the prompts. The fact that it runs on Linux is also 100% transparent to the user.)

But for VMware's client hypervisor product, starting from Linux certainly makes sense. Right off the bat you've got a huge device compatibility list, and you've got a desktop OS that understands batteries, GPUs, and the other essential elements of a desktop OS.

It's too early to know what devices VMware will officially support with their client hypervisor. Right now they're looking at having a focused group of certified devices, but it will be possible to install this thing on other devices too. They're thinking that they will support several deployment options, like locally-installed on disk, USB-stick based, and even some kind of embedded "ESXi-like" capability.

The competition

As I wrote towards the beginning of this article, there aren't any mainstream Type 1 client hypervisors. When talking to the VMware folks at VMworld, they repeated several times that they've put a lot of work into this, and they feel that they're really ahead of the competition.

In the Type 1 client hypervisor space, there are a few other companies or products to consider:

Neocleus. I talked about Neocleus in Part 2 of my VMworld vendor roundup.
Virtual Computer. I talked about Neocleus in Part 3 of my VMworld vendor roundup.
Citrix. They don't have anything here yet, but they're starting to think about it. Honestly it would probably be easier for them to just buy Neocleus or Virtual Computer.
Xen Client Initiative. This is an effort to port the open source Xen hypervisor to the client. It sounds cool, but I'm not 100% clear on what the status is. I've read articles that talk about it, but I can't figure out how to download it if it's actually real.

Of course there are a lot of non-bare metal Type 2 hypervisor products out there too, like Microsoft Virtual PC / Kidaro, VMware ACE, MokaFive, and RingCube.

WT3360SE Smart Card Problem

neshin — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 08:12:16 GMT

Hi!

I have about 100 WT3360SE upgraded to CE 4.2. Current RDP version is 5.1+ b25. Problem is: SC works for only once. Example: if i logon to TS using SC, i connot use it anymore, if i logon normally i can use it once on server. i've tried two different SC readers. with other terminals with RDP 5.5 i have no problem. I see 3 ways to possibly fix it:

1. crossgrade to blazer os. anybody knows does it upport SC-s? i can't check because i don't have a conversion kit.

2. install someway RDP 5.5. is it possible?

3. make my own linux firmware for it.

any suggestions?

Citrix presentation server and ms office best practice - especially for laptop users

monster — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 09:48:32 GMT

Hi all,

I have recently joined an organisation that has a very strange IT environment, and I am having trouble getting an understanding from the internal staff as to what the problems are and I wanted to get an experieced citrix guru's opionion.

So the setup is as follows: small offices in every state inc NZ, data centre in NSW, the offices are connecting to the datacentre through verizon 1mb MPLS links. The people consist of about 120 laptop users (they connect in via a wifi 3G card), who travel frequently, and about 80 desktop/thin client users. We have citrix running to all users and presenting file shares, printing, great plains and MS office (even outlook). My experience as a new user has not been good, I find the citrix delivery of MS office confusing and inefficeint especially outlook. Office apps frequent experience significant lag, and I am finding that settings within outlook often are not maintained and 'reset' between sessions.

I am also finding that the PCs are not locked down properly allowing some to run office apps locally as well this creats more confusion.

My question is this can citrix present ms office apps 'properly' in a perfect world. And should we be delivering office to mobile laptop users?

Does this sound like a configuration and resource issue or is it a 'bad practice' type issue?

HP 5730 XP embedded, creating an image

skissinger — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:53:35 GMT

Completely new to thin clients, so please forgive the noob question.

We got in ~20 HP 5730, anticipating more in the months to come. We do not have Altiris in house, and I strongly doubt it will be implemented, ever. Based on my research so far, in order to support these devices using ConfigMgr, a .sld macro needs to be built into the image. Is there a nice noob-friendly step-by-step guide? Or are there other better solutions?

Reinstall of 2K3 TS License server?

rupert — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:39:46 GMT

Hello,

Trying this again.

I have recently completed my migration from MF XP on W2K to PS 4.5 on W2K3. Completely decommisioned old farm and servers(6) and 2K TS License server.
I use WYSE S10's and 1125's to connect to my farm published desktop and apps.

I have plenty of TS cals for my user base but have currently run out of TS licenses. When I look at my TS License I noticed that I have a bunch of licenses issued (about 60) to my old 2K TS/Citrix boxes. I had 6 servers in my old farm, so each one is issued multiple licenses.
These license have expiration dates starting end of this month and running through Oct. I know they will return to the available pool when they expire, but the bulk of them are a couple of weeks away.

I would like to try to reclaim these now. MS clearing house wont reissue me licenses, told me to reinstall TS licensing.

If I deactivate, uninstall, reinstall and reactivate what affect will that have on my currently issued TS lic to my WYSE units? Will those still be good until they expire and then they will just be reissued a new one from the new install? Or will they throw errors at me right away?
I have a couple of S10's that will not connect and aren't issued a temp lic.

Any help suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Bruce

Reinstall of 2K3 TS License server?

rupert — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:39:46 GMT