XenDesktopMaster

Today I received my brand new NVIDIA ION mainbord from Point of View which I bought to update my personal HTPC. But it came to my mind why no one is using this thing as thin client?

In my following article I assume that the customer is going to use Citrix XenDesktop for delivering desktops and applications to his employees. That means the thin clients are going to connect to Windows flavored desktops which are published through XenDesktop.

You can get a full featured NVIDIA ION-based PC for about 257€. Full featured means: Single- or Dual Core 1,6 Ghz Atom CPU, 2Gigs of RAM, 320GB HDD, Geforce 9400m GPU, Gigabit ethernet and even a DVD writer. Oh and yes, you can also use multiple monitors as you have HDMI, DVI and VGA video output.

The power consumption is also pretty low compared to a normal desktop PC, a DELL Optiplex 740n needs about 60 to 90 watts. The ION only needs about 20 watts in idle state and between 25 and 30 watts under full load.

Compared to a state of the art Igel UD5 thin client with kind of the same raw hardware specs (1,5 Ghz VIA CPU, 512/1GB RAM, 2GB Flash HDD) and which needs about 18 watts in idle state, the ION-based system is really cheap. The Igel thin client cost about 394€ with Linux and about 494€ with Windows Embedded Standard.

Little calculation example:

Even with a full Windows XP or 7 Professional license the NVIDIA ION thin client costs about 100€ less.

You need to keep in mind that you need Microsoft VECD licenses in both cases, which are about $110/device/year. If you’re not using an OEM version of Windows but an enterprise licensed version for which you have software assurance, it only costs about $23/device/year. By the way the last option isn’t available if you’re using a traditional thin client.

I have to mention that Igel includes a license for its Management Suite in their price tag. But as Citrix XenDesktop includes a feature called “Local Streamed Desktops”, which basically enables you to stream a central managed vDisk to your local desktops by using Citrix Provisioning Services, there is no need for any further management software here. You can delivery a single image to all your ION thin clients and update these images in the manner of a reboot.

As you are using XenDesktop regardless if you are using traditional thin clients or NVIDIA ION-based thin clients, I bet you would be using Provisioning services to deliver your virtual desktops, also there aren’t any additional costs here you can just use your existing Provisioning servers for delivering your thin client vDisk. But keep in mind that you need at least Citrix XenDesktop Enterprise Edition for doing this.

Now we’re going to see the real advantages of the NVIDIA ION-based thin clients. Based on the power which these little boxes have and the Windows operating system on top you can enjoy every cool Citrix HDX feature like

• HDX Plug-n-play support (Full USB support as it is running a full version of Windows)
• HDX MediaStream support, even for HD scale content (Thanks to NVIDIA’s ION platform)
• HDX MediaStream for Flash support (Which is only supported on top of Windows today)
• HDX IntelliCache (which works best with the newest Windows clients)

and so on.

Now after we have shown that you get more features as with a traditional thin client and sort of the same easy and painless management (Thanks to Provisioning services) for less money, the last question is: how do I get the same “power on your device and get directly connect to your virtual desktop”-user experience you get with a thin client with a normal Windows box? That’s easy, Citrix is providing the XenDesktop Desktop Appliance mode, which is an addition to the Citrix online plug-in.

After you installed the Desktop Appliance mode a user immediately gets connected to his XenDesktop session after he logs on to the local desktop and when the user finished working and shuts down his virtual machine the local machine also shuts down automatically.

Well, last but not least you can also do the things mentioned in this article with a traditional desktop PC. So you even have the possibility to transform your fat client into a thin client.