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Server for 240 thin clients

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  • Windows
  • Business Computing
  • Servers
Last response: in Business Computing
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March 31, 2014 2:04:25 PM

Hey, I would like to know what kind of server I would need for 240 thin clients.

80% of them would run windows specific (not very resource heavy) programs, while other 20% of users would use them only for internet.

Would 1 server be enough at all? :) 

PS. It's for my project from IT class.

More about : server 240 thin clients

March 31, 2014 2:09:15 PM

Can you afford to have 240 people who can't work if there is a problem with the server? One server is never enough to support thin clients properly.
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March 31, 2014 2:18:29 PM

What kind of thin clients will you be running? Are they actual Thin Client workstations or regular workstations that you are turning into thin clients?

And will the server run windows or linux? Sounds like it would be windows. But for 240 users you may need a pretty beefy server. Definaly want a LOT or ram. at least like 512 megs per user but thats if all 240 are being ran at the same exact time.
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March 31, 2014 2:25:28 PM

512 MB per user sounds like far too much memory to me. The thin clients only really use RAM to store their individual data as the OS and program running share the same RAM for all clients.

It very much depends upon exactly what application(s) you are running, and the only way to be sure is to do some measurements on a real system. We used to run clustered Citrix servers serving Office and IE to clients and each client required far less than 512 MB. That's almost enough to run a real PC, OS, programs and all.
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March 31, 2014 3:11:59 PM

It will be windows server 2012



So how much Ram do I really need?
would 16GB x4 be enough?

And what about CPU?

We are talking about regular thin client workstations.


Here's what I came up with:
CyberStore 424S WSS iSCSI SAN / NAS Configured with:

Broadberry 4U 24 Hot-Swap Bay with Redundant 1200Watt Power Supply, 6Gb/s Backplane
X9DRi-F 16 Dimm Slots, Dual Intel Gigabit LAN, On Board Graphics, On Board SATA RAID 0,1, IPMI & Remote KVM
2x E5-2630 V2 Intel Six-Core Xeon 2.6GHz 15MB Cache - 80 Watts
2x 32GB 1600MHz DDR3 ECC Reg w/Parity DIMM Dual Rank
LSI MegaRAID 9280-4i4e 6Gb/s SAS/SATA RAID Controller with External Port For Expansion
10GbE Dual-Port SFP+ Server Adapter - Solarflare SFN5162F
Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 - Standard Edition (Includes NAS & iSCSI)
APC Smart-UPS SC 1000VA Rack-mountable UPS
3 Year Standard Warranty
9-5 Technical Support for System Lifetime
48 Hour Comprehensive System Testing Procedure
UK Country Kit & Mains Cable
£5,762.27 Ex. VAT


SSDs/HDDs will be "bought" seperately, but yeah, I need as many bays as I can get.


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March 31, 2014 4:04:51 PM

Thats pretty beefy. Its been a looong time since i last worked with thin clients (2003-2005ish and that was redhat LTSP running on P4 2.8's with 4Gb of ram and had 4 of them)

As for the ram part it really just matter on what they are doing. 512 per user is a lot but not really needed. Just a suggestion. 64Gb of ram should be plenty especially if they aren't all on there at the same time.

I Personally haven't dealt with the Windows Thin Client before. Only Redhat LTSP and the Sun Systems SunFire Pro's servers.

One BIG thing in my opinion is make sure you have a Network Card that support Nic Teaming. Its where it combines two NIC cards to make 1 Vitural one. This is good because 1) more bandwith and 2) If one Nic card goes down the other handles the rest with out interrupption.

Now just how often will there be 240 of these thin client running is the real question. If you are going to have a lot of people on them at once then yea you want to keep it Beefy. if not and is money is an issue then you can bring it down a bit on the memory and CPU.
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April 1, 2014 1:05:17 AM

okay another question, if we choose thin clients with built-in 2GB RAM, will this memory be used for virtualised OS? or is it only for some fancy features for running independantly from server?
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April 1, 2014 12:04:49 PM

That should use the ram for that terminal and what they do i think. Not sure. What thin clients are you looking at?
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April 1, 2014 2:39:48 PM

With RDP all the processing is done on the server. All the client does is to interpret the data stream from the server. Extra RAM won't help with that; I can only think that those thin clients also have standalone features as the RAM would be fairly useless otherwise.
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April 13, 2014 6:32:53 PM

I've worked with NComputing L200. We calculate a great maximum of 30 stations per 2nd Gen I5 server, 16GB Ram and common Sata II hard drives, running WS 2003 with NComputing own software. In my opinion its very important you have to think quite well about redundancy since it can be not only used for fail-over but for a cluster. So instead of using a single huge server, I would use two mid-class.

--
Ignacio Pitasi
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April 16, 2014 5:37:09 PM

SmOg3R said:
It will be windows server 2012



So how much Ram do I really need?
would 16GB x4 be enough?

And what about CPU?

We are talking about regular thin client workstations.


Here's what I came up with:
CyberStore 424S WSS iSCSI SAN / NAS Configured with:

Broadberry 4U 24 Hot-Swap Bay with Redundant 1200Watt Power Supply, 6Gb/s Backplane
X9DRi-F 16 Dimm Slots, Dual Intel Gigabit LAN, On Board Graphics, On Board SATA RAID 0,1, IPMI & Remote KVM
2x E5-2630 V2 Intel Six-Core Xeon 2.6GHz 15MB Cache - 80 Watts
2x 32GB 1600MHz DDR3 ECC Reg w/Parity DIMM Dual Rank
LSI MegaRAID 9280-4i4e 6Gb/s SAS/SATA RAID Controller with External Port For Expansion
10GbE Dual-Port SFP+ Server Adapter - Solarflare SFN5162F
Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 - Standard Edition (Includes NAS & iSCSI)
APC Smart-UPS SC 1000VA Rack-mountable UPS
3 Year Standard Warranty
9-5 Technical Support for System Lifetime
48 Hour Comprehensive System Testing Procedure
UK Country Kit & Mains Cable
£5,762.27 Ex. VAT


SSDs/HDDs will be "bought" seperately, but yeah, I need as many bays as I can get.




£5,762.27 (or $9,680) USD is abit over priced for this system,
We can have this system built for £4,129 or $5,699

**SUPERMICRO CSE-846E16-R1200B Black Server
1200W Redundant P.S w/ 4U 24Bay hot swap [$1,350]
**Supermicro X9DRI-F server board intel 350 lan & IPMI [$450]
**2x 32GB 1600MHz DDR3 ECC Reg w/Parity DIMM Dual Rank [$750]
**2x E5-2620 V2 Intel Six-Core Xeon 2.1GHz 15MB Cache [$860]
**LSI MegaRAID 9280-4i4e 6Gb/s SAS/SATA RAID Controller [$600]
**SAS cable [$10]
**2x Passive CPU heatsink [$30]
**QLogic 10GbE Dual-Port SFP+ Server Adapter [$350]
**APC Smart-UPS SC 1000VA Rack-mountable UPS [$650]
**Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Stardard Edition [$650]
**48 Hour Comprehensive System Stress and Consistency Test [FREE]
**3 years warranty parts and labor [FREE]

KeithL at rackmountpro com / superxpert com
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