[K12OSN] network design

"Terrell Prudé, Jr." microman at cmosnetworks.com
Sun Feb 6 17:37:05 UTC 2005


Paul Satherley wrote:

> Sharon Betts wrote:
>
>> Hello everyone -- can I get a discussion going to help me sort out my
>> plans?
>>
>> I would like some input on my network design.  I have 4 schools and a
>> business office; 3000 users; and over 1000 machines (growing by leaps 
>> and
>>  
>>
> LTSP scales to 30 thin-clients per 4G ram and a dual Cpu box..with 
> that in mind.
>

That depends on what desktop you have people using, which apps they're 
expected to run, etc.  For either GNOME or KDE with OpenOffice.org and 
Firefox/Thunderbird (or traditional Mozilla), I'd say between 30 and 40 
thin clients is the max.  My dual-proc server with 4GB DRAM handles 25 
today and has enough room for another roughly 15 before swapping starts 
taking place.  My kids run their choice of GNOME or KDE.

On the other hand, if you have the users running, say, IceWM or XFce, 
you could probably put more than 40 users on.  If you're talking apps 
with few screen updates like OO.o and Moz/Firefox/Tbird, go for it.  If 
you have a bunch of people running, say, TuxType, which is known for 
large amounts of screen updates, then network bandwidth becomes the 
bottleneck.  Even a Gig-E card can keep up with only 14 people playing 
TuxType at 1024x768x24bit.  That number may rise at lower resolutions; I 
would expect it to.  In the TuxType situation, you'd want to use two 
Gig-E NICs in your server, ganged together in what Cisco parlance calls 
an "EtherChannel" (I think the official term is "multilink").  Then you 
can get as many as 28 TuxType users.

--TP




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