[Thinlinc-technical] RES: More users / Less servers

[Marcos de Souza Trazzini - Avancera]

Hi Peter.

My comments inline too... 


> ...
> > I could see that GNOME is the great villain here, since it starts a 
> > lot of
> 
> Yes, this is quite much. It's a little bit funny, because the 
> other day I was talking to a person which claimed that his 
> GNOME desktops only consumed 74 MiB per user, considerably 
> less than our estimation of 100-150MiB.
> 
Why is it funny? 74MB per user on GNOME seems to be impossible for me,
please ask this person what is the big secret of this miraculous GNOME mem
usage...


> If you consider VDI installations, especially with Windows 
> Vista or 7, then 1 or 2 GiB per concurrent user is more typical.
>
Humm, two points here: (1) You´re right about Winvows Vista, which is really
a memory eater, but I don´t see anyone using it on VDI environments. Here is
much more common to see Windows XP on VDI machines. (2) Windows 7 memory
footprint is really (expressively!) lower than Vista, and Microsoft also
claim to offer integrated solutions using Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V
that greatly reduces VDI guest OS memory consumption. 
 
> It's clear that there is no such thing as a "standard" 
> desktop; your mileage may vary...
> 
In fact, when I mean a "standard" desktop, I mean a desktop focused on
general user needs over ThinLinc sessions, that is basically get access to
their published applications, interact with files and simple devices and
possibily be similar to a Windows environment, as we should remember that
here in Brazil corporate users don´t see Linux desktops with good sight, and
they are really used to Windows desktops. So, that´s because I´m putting
some work here to offer those points on a ThinLinc Linux-based desktop which
has a Windows-like look and feel.


> 
> > Please let me know if any of my ideas makes sense for you, 
> or even if you
> > are already making efforts on this area acually.
> 
> Well, not really, I guess it matters where you live in the 
> world, but here in Sweden, I don't consider the memory prices 
> very high. For example, if you purchase a Dell R710 server, you 
> can upgrade the RAM from 4 GiB to 12 GiB for only ~$300. Assuming 
> GNOME sessions of 300 MiB each, this corresponds to 40 sessions, 
> or $7.5 per concurrent user. This is much less than the costs 
> associated with software licenses. For example, the ThinLinc 
> subscription currently costs $75 per concurrent user.
> 
Despite the hardware costs, we also have competitors solutions that require
less hardware to run (like Terminal Server os GO-Global). So, if I got your
point correctly (forgive me if don´t), you´re telling that our whole
solution cost (hardware+software) is really price-attractive, even requiring
more hardware? If so, I disagree, since considering that WTS CALS are
cheaper than ThinLinc (at least here in Brazil...) and that we can have
twice the users on the same hardware using WTS, it is not so difficult to
think that we should try to offer a solution that require less hardware.
Please notice that I´m considering bandwidth costs (very expensive here!),
what is a key point on SBC solutions over WAN/Internet connections.

Please notive that I´m sure that ThinLinc has much more to offer than
standalone WTS, and the point here is not claim about ThinLinc itself, but
to try to find a way to make ThinLinc sessions devour less hardware.

Kind regards.
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