Hi,
Our company has a mixed environment of Sun workstations, servers and X
terminals. I'm trying to figure out the best way to enable people to run
hebrew word (or other required Win32 software) on their desktops.
I know I have three options, NT Terminal Server Edition, VNC and VMWare.
I dropped NT TS right out of the questions, because it probably doesn't have a
hebrew version (We have an MSDN subscription, so already have NTTS. I have
only seen a copy on the US distribution, not on any of the international
distributions). It also probably doesn't work with a Sun workstation as a
client (our X terminals *do* have a WinTerminal mode).
VNC is free and simple to configure, but is restricted. If the machine
crashes, you have to get there and fix it. It's also strictly one user per
machine.
Also, does VNC works with a simple X terminal? I know the original version
required a local client, but I remember hearing something about the latest VNC
being able to work with any X terminal. Is it true?
OKay, so I think we are left with VMware. Here I have some questions:
1. Has any one tries running VMware with a dual processor machine?
2. has anyone tries running two copies simultanously on a two processor
machine?
3. How much CPU time does an idle Windows desktop requires? (sorry if this
sounds like Yoda grammer ;-) ). I know that Win95 ate 99% of my CPU time even
when the system was idle. I haven't installed NT on it yet. has anyone did
this?
4. Does the VMware Win32 display driver improve the speed when working on a
remote X terminal? My test machine has VMware with a plain 16MB/Win95
configuration on a 32MB machine and it works suprisingly well (relatively
speaking) I wouldn't mind, though even better performance.
What I'm aiming at, is having a dual processor machine serving about 4
sessions (assuming I put 256MB SDRAM on the machine), hoping that idle Windows
NT time will not consume CPU time. I plan to sharing the virtual disk (leaving
it read-only, or whatever the VMware config where changes are dropped is
called).
I have the feeling the release version is noticably faster than the beta
version, not surprisingly, since VMware themselves have said that the beta
versions has tons of debug code.
As for the machine, Ideally I would like to get a twin PPGA celeron 300A, with
two slocket boards supporting overclocking and MPP, plugging these into a
decent dual CPU board. The celerons would be overclocked to 450MHz ofcourse!
(Are the 300A PPGA still available?)
Ideally, I would like to see a front end program that would even manage the
number of sessions (allows me to limit them), and could even hold a session
open and allows a user to use an open session (saving the VM reboot time). I
guess this is possible, but it probably requires major coding (a program
pretending to be an X server, keeping the session open, but which really only
serves the X traffic to a "real" X server somplace else on the LAN).
Now that I think of this - could this be done by combining VNC in front of
VMware?
what do you think?
Udi
