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The requirement is this:

I need to run legacy (Windows Client/server ) applications on disk-less nodes for a customer.

The customer wants to: a) use bare-minimum configuration systems for end-users (disk-less nodes) b) manage application upgrades centrally (the entire setup will likely run on a LAN but WAN cannot be ruled out at this time. either way administration / upgrade / maintenance should not require attending to each PC individually) c) be able to ensure users can access only the legacy app and not be able to fiddle with the OS settings d) have more clarity on whether the app alone can be sent to the nodes or the entire desktop

I am totally confused with what I've read about PXE, Presentation Server, Terminal Services, XenApp, XenDesktop, Hyper-V.

What fits where? What components are essential? Each of these seems to have some overlap and its not clear to me how I should set this up to achieve the above? Hopefully the questions make sense.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Jim B
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alan-p
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3 Answers3

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The microsoft site explaining all of this is windows enterprise. If you are going to run the app over the wan using a server resource to provide the majority of CPU time for all applications then the section to review is virtual desktop infrastructure. If instead you would like to use the users machine for some tasks but would like to run certain applications from the network (which is not what you are describing but fits into the terms you were mentioning) then take a look at the session virtualization link. Finally, if you want to simply manage applications from a central point and not have to worry about compatability or co-existance issues (usually for legacy apps or "metered" applications, take a look at the med-v link. Most of the terms you are mentioning are related to implementing 1 of those 3 flavors of application virtualization (that term used in its broadest sense).

Jim B
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I'll try to stay in the Microsoft camp of technologies to keep it simpler. One of the first questions you should ask is hinted at by Jim B, but let’s assume you’re talking "thin clients" which is what a diskless node is:

Can you use presentation virtualization or desktop virtualization?
In more words: Can you get away with RDS (Remote Desktop Services) aka terminal services/Citrix or do you need the more costly VDI (Virtual Desktops)?

Med-V is out as it’s for managing apps on client hard drives and you’re on thin clients, so to me it's between RDS and VDI.

RDS is the good old terminal server now called a Remote Desktop Services Session Host. You install client apps on the server and users use Remote Desktop (RDP) to connect to a single server (or pool of servers) that runs multiple user logon sessions at the same time. These users are using a Windows Server 2008 R2 desktop, and if an admin looked at task manager they would see all the users .exe's running on one server. There are extra features that makes this user friendly through a web browser, load balanced/FT, and Remote Desktop Gateway which runs it all over SSL port 443 to make it Internet firewall friendly.

If your app has special requirements, and you have users who need their own Client OS to themselves, with their own C: drive, RAM, etc. that's where you can optionally deploy VDI on top of RDS. CAD may be a good example of this. So users are still sitting at thin clients, but when they logon to the remote session, they are actually using one of many Windows 7 client virtual machines running separately on one or more Hyper-V servers. They could still be all sharing the same physical server hardware, but now they have their own "world" to play in. Usually this is only deployed when a Session Host (terminal server) won't fit the bill.

Maybe if you describe the usage some more of the application and users we could help you narrow down the field of choices. RDS is great and rather easy to manage (compared to VDI and other options) if you can get the app to perform well running many times concurrently on a single server through multiple logins.

Citrix is usually only need to run on top of RDS when you go big to thousands of users, but even then the newest Windows Server 2008 R2 RDS can get you there.

Bret Fisher
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What your customer wants is totally addressed by "OS streaming".

Check products such as Hp Image Manager, Wyse Streaming Manager, Double-Take Flex, CCBoot.

These products use PXE for network booting and add a "virtual disk driver" so that the clients can boot off a server-based shared virtual disk.

When in a WAN/LAN scenario, the usual implementation is to have a (small) proxy server in each "branch", and have this proxy automatically upgrading the virtual disks it serves (for instance using rsynch/rdiff). Some of the products mentioned above have the "manage remote servers" features.

MrLeV
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