[ok-mail] [K12OSN] Scalability (long email)

[Terrell Prude', Jr.]

It wasn't my choice, unfortunately.  Back then I worked for not just a 
Microsoft shop, but a totally rabid Microsoft shop.  The very notion of 
running anything that was Free Software was total anathema to this 
company.  They basically subscribed to the notion that, "if it *can* run 
on NT/2000, it *will* run on NT/2000."  Actually putting OpenOffice.org 
on anybody's computer might well have gotten me fired, even if the user 
had specifically asked for it, unless it had been a major partner 
(wasn't gonna happen).

So, to answer your question, we never took them off of Microsoft in the 
first place.  We simply made them run their apps locally again.

That does bring to mind a question, though:  Norbert, can you tell us 
why you need to run twenty client sessions on a Windows Terminal 
Server?  Would folks not be better suited by a K12LTSP server?

--TP

Brian Chase wrote:

> This must be why Citrix is so successful, because the native WTS does 
> such a poor job of it.  What I can't figure out is why you took your 
> whole office staff back to Microsoft when OpenOffice has been out for 
> several years now.
>
> Terrell Prude', Jr. wrote:
>
>> That's one of the major problems with Windows Terminal Server; the 
>> underlying platform's just not efficient.  The RDP protocol used with 
>> it is reasonably efficient, but the server itself gets S-L-O-W very 
>> quickly.  I never did more than five on a dual-PIII, 900MHz, 1GB DRAM 
>> box w/ Ultra3-SCSI RAID, back when I was running Windows networks, 
>> for performance reasons; with any more, the CPUs kept pegging, and 
>> the memory subsystem kept almost continuously swapping to disk.  As 
>> it was, there was plenty of swapping, and the CPUs were heavily 
>> used.  We also had stability issues with user applications (e. g. 
>> Microsoft Office).  We ended up using Terminal Services only for us 
>> sysadmins and making everyone run MS Office on their desktops again.  
>> Boy, did we learn!
>>
>> If for some reason you have to do this for twenty clients on one 
>> server, then I'd recommend going for, at a minimum, a four processor 
>> box, with max GHz (currently we're talking either Xeon 3.2GHz's or 
>> Opteron 2.2GHz's (that's the 848 model, BTW).  Also, better have no 
>> less than 4GB DRAM, and more is definitely not overkill.
>>
>> --TP
>>
>> norbert wrote:
>>
>>> Ooops that's a P-III & just for clarification we're using K12LTSP 
>>> with diskless client, from each client we launch a rdesktop session.
>>>
>>> thks again
>>> norbert
>>>
>>> bear2bar at netscape.net wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> Has anyone setup rdesktop with linux on 20 + workstations ? (With 
>>>> Win2K) and what specs are needed for the Win2K server to handle the 
>>>> load.
>>>> We've setup a P-II 500 Mhz with 512mb ram and can barely launch 3 
>>>> connections. The response is incrediblly SLOW....
>>>>
>>>> thanks for the input
>>>>
>>>> norbert
>>>>
>>>> jhansknecht at hanstech.com wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 21:26, Shawn Powers wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>  
>>>>>
>>>>>> snip
>>>>>> I have 3 schools, all connected via fiber.  There are approx 30 
>>>>>> classrooms per building, with a variation of 10 & 100mbit 
>>>>>> connections internally.  The 2 big directions I'm looking at 
>>>>>> would be to have 90 "mini-labs", where a teacher gets a new 
>>>>>> white-box Pentium 4 computer, and have it serve as a classroom 
>>>>>> LTSP server to 5 or 6 "junker" thin clients for the students 
>>>>>> (much like the original case study Paul Nelson put up several 
>>>>>> years back).  If the student management system won't work under 
>>>>>> Wine -- that teacher computer would have to run win4lin or some 
>>>>>> such solution.
>>>>>>   
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Instead of win4lin think about using a Windows terminal server with
>>>>> rdesktop. ....you will need to spend a little but I suspect you 
>>>>> will be
>>>>> able to conqueror this application requirement.
>>>>>  
>>>>>