Help VMWare View vs Xen Desktop

[jM2.me]

For couple months now I have been bother by a company that I had some work done with. Some of their computers get infected and become unusable. Antivirus doesnt seem to do the justice and owner can blow some money out.

Not so a while ago I read an article about VMWare View and Xen Desktop. In lames terms, one+ server(s), multiple thin clients = workspace with all stuff going on the server(s). Brillian! And the best part, master image can be configured and edited easily. I wonder why I haven't read about it before. I spoke with owner and tomorrow I will be deploying VMWare View using 3 of their I7 systems for servers.

A person that I kind know, suggested to use xen desktop instead. Honestly never heard of citrix but vmware software is ready for deployment.

So the question is, has anyone from ragezone deployed vmware view or xen desktop? How did they perform? Doesnt network get bottlenecked with 10+ clients running at full resolution?

[bobsobol]

I've never used VMWare View, but I have used Citrix Metaframe and Xen, as well as Microsoft Terminal Services Server.

The answer, with both of these is that it does not. The reason is that you cannot practically use them for highly graphical applications.

You don't do your Video Editing or even Photoshop on these systems. If you try, you invariably get corrupted screen, lost connection and disconnected login session.

We gradually reigned back these services as, while they are great even for every day browsing, the moment you start using YouTube or such, the system falls down. Increasingly, people are considering such things to be "every day browsing".

What the "thin client" is responsible for is nothing more and nothing less than handling the mouse pointer and keyboard input, rendering windows and all the graphics on them. You have to disable themeing services because that's an excessive strain on the connection... mostly. But the base images (back-buffer) is stored in the thin client and it positions it and moves it around for the server. So unlike VNC or such, these things don't have to be transmitted and then retransmitted every time you scroll the window view down a bit.

Some thin clients can handle 3D acceleration via OpenGL too, and if your users are used to using Unix terminals that actually works great for almost everything they do. It's completely useless in Windows though, because most Windows programs use DirectX, and that absolutely does not translate or transmit. You usually get a message which says that there is no hardware capable of being performing the required function.

It's still useful for office productivity and accountancy type tasks. Or would be, if our major accountancy product hasn't moved to a propitiatory "thin client" of it's own, using your web browser and Silverlight as the "thin client". Silverlight also does not transport well over these technologies.

Ultimately, I can see cloud based thin client desktops like eyeOS becoming the norm. But that requires reliance on Microsoft Office becoming a thing of the past. I believe that it's days are numbered because I can't see people moving to Windows 8 when they could run Android or iOS on their touch screen desktop PC and still have as little compatibility with existing Windows software. XD But Office 365 may survive the cloud transition.