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Apps Cloud Engineer virtualisation

PCoIP over VMWare View (for Keeping Up with the #Cricket Wherever You Are)

PCoIP thin client technology in use
I’ve been trying out thin client software at the office, specifically PCoIP running over VMware View.

It’s going very well. The station I sat at had just a keyboard, mouse and screen with a small connector box hooking me up with the network. I was running a virtual instance of Windows with the actual application running on a virtual machine in our data centre.

You wouldn’t know that there was no PC in a box underneath the desk.  The beauty of this technology is the fact that I can install a virtual client on my PC at home (or anywhere else) that will allow me to log in and replicate my work environment. It consumes much less power and also makes management of the whole estate much easier.  New users can be provisioned in seconds – the process of building a PC can take a day.

EVGA PD02The experience is great – in fact I didn’t know I wasn’t sat at a PC when I started using it. The header photo shows the workstation set up (a bit untidy – click to see more) and the inset photo (right)  is of the EVEA connector box. You can have up to 4 monitors using a DVI splitter plug – something our geeks really like.

The box is an EVGA PD02. They retail at around £216 plus VAT. When you add the costs of the licenses the individual per unit cost is roughly the same as a fully loaded new PC so the cost saving is in the management – IT staff headcount I guess if you were looking at a large estate.

Note England are doing well in the cricket against India which is why I sat at the workstation in the first place – I wanted an update of the score 🙂 . Invitations to the Oval test gratefully accepted.

 

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

7 replies on “PCoIP over VMWare View (for Keeping Up with the #Cricket Wherever You Are)”

Just to throw the question out there this is a zero client, what thin clients are you comparing this to and what are the differences you’ve notice between devices? Oh and nice VMware book in the background

Hi Bryan,

I’m the Application Services Manager at Timico, who’s been responsible for all of the R&D of the view platform, and our new virtualisation deployment that will be going into our shiny new datacenter when it’s finished! As such, I can completely appreciate how you can make mistakes like mistyping the type of book in the background, I know how much of a headache it can be! 🙂

It was possibly me that told tref this was a thin client and not a zero client, on a friday afternoon it’s too easy to get your words mixed! You’re spot on though, that’s a zero client, and it’s the only physical bit of kit we’ve tried so far, and there’s a reason for that; that’s the only zero client we’ve found that has dual DVI outputs (some have dual output, but are DVI and VGA, we wanted dual DVI). In the new building, we’re putting 2 monitors on every desk by default, so this was an important choice to us. We’re still in a reasonably early stages of the research on View, and that zero client only arrived with us this morning – up until that point we’d just been using the software client. We’re all pretty impressed!

Hi Ian,

That wasn’t meant to correct anybody when I stated this was a zero client, was just wondering what other device you were comparing this too. So how are you liking the Teradici Tera1100 chip processing those little pixel packed UDP packets for PCoIP prot or are you using RDP which is strange if you are but not unheard of. Awesome to hear back from you, I directly work with the EVGA PD01s & PD02s are you located in Europe and doing a EVGA evaluation unit out there like they do in the USA? By software clients do you mean like using a desktop with the view agent installed. Ian it would cool to see a blog from the admin perspective (not many out there) with stuff on specs of servers or any frustrations or headaches in setup. Let me know if there is any other blog I am missing you may have posted.

Tref,
thanks again for posting this looking for more people using these devices and blogging about these…..

Thanks,
Bryan

It’s PCoIP that we’re using. I’m not sure how we acquired the device to be honest, our internal IT department sorted that out – it’s a different branch from me who deals more with the virtualisation platform than the desktop area. I’m pretty sure we had to purchased it though, and had a few issues getting it in because they weren’t ready to ship to the UK market due to lack of UK power supplies. I might be wrong about that though! Dell did offer us evaluation on their units though, but we’ve not tried them yet.

As for blogging about it – I run my own personal blog on http://pookey.co.uk – no doubt as I start to deploy things into the new Timico datacenter next year, I’ll have more to say about these kinds of things.

Thanks for pointing out your sight will be looking into for some updates I see the installing ESXi from PXE looking for more post like that keep up the good work!

Tref,
I like the post here glad to see more people are accepting the virtualization world with open arms. Cool post like the blog will be looking forward to more post like this.

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