thin client server suggestion?

[Knut Yrvin]

lørdag 17 september 2005, 14:45, skrev Matt Price:
> THe tuxlabs documentation suggests:
> - 2 gig ram

Gives support for ~40 thin clients with ICEwm with OpenOffice and Firefox. 

http://www.icewm.org/

Using GNOME or KDE 4 GB RAM is recommended for 48 thin client (then you meet 
the bandwidth limitation where every thin client uses around 2 Gbit/s). 

Our rule of thumb for memory is 320 GB with one client on the thin client 
server, and 64 MB for every client after that for using OpenOffice and 
FireFox. 

There is OK to use a dual-core |Opteron chip, or a HT Xeon cpu with 20-25 thin 
clients and 2 GB RAM. It's working extremely well with dual Xeon - if you got 
the money. With 20-25 thin clients you ned 2 GB RAM. 

> - SCSI drives

It depends on what kind of architecture you want to install. If you gonna 
store all the user-files on the server, then a mirrored disk is recommended 
(RAID 1). When connecting the thin client server to a file server, as many do 
in large installations with 500-800 thin clients, the they usually sell the 
thin client server with one fast SATA-disk with 5 years warranty. Then the 
fileserver has 4 disks (3 disks in RAID 5 and 1 extra if one of the RAID-disk 
fails). 

Many schools in Norway connects many thin client servers to a 
Skolelinux-file-server: 

http://developer.skolelinux.no/arkitektur/arkitektur.html.en

In primary schools pupils seldom use more than 50-100 MB for every user. When 
usring a 73 GB scsi the system takes ~8 GB (3 GB for the installed programs, 
and free space to swap, var, ...) Then you have 65 GB / 100 MB = 650 
users ...

> - gigabit Ethernet (also gigabit Ethernet on the switch, which I don't
> have -- we only have donated 3Com 3300 switches, which are nice but
> all 10/100 (far as I know, anyway).  

It depends on how many thin clients you wanna support. When splitting 
a 1 Gbit/s net into switches with 100 Mbit/s, then you could expand 
your net with more thin clients than the 48-50 client limit with 
100 Mbit/s. Then the RAM-limit decides how many clients you run 
(the 320 in the bottom + 64 MB for each thin client with the GNOME or 
KDE alternative). When using 10 Mbit/s you just get 5 thin clients up 
running.  When using 100 Mbit/s you get 48-50 thin clients up running. 
When using 1 Gbit/s over 400 thin clients are possible :-).

An other option: 

In Norway 15 schools already have installed half thick clients with 
Skolelinux, and you can limit the server to one CPU, 512MB-1GB RAM, and the 
amount of disks you need. Recommendation for the clients are > 700 MHz 
processor, 256 MB RAM and + 0,5 GB local swap-disk. Then you can connect >100 
half thick clients to the server on a 100 Mbit/s backbone ...

- Knut Yrvin