diskless windows philosophical question

Hello all,

I'm beginning to work on a project where we have an existing lab of PCs
running Windows 2K and XP (and a few running Linux) and would like to
eliminate the system drives from them.

These systems run a variety of applications related to real time flight
simulation, where timing is important and the applications could
require significant compute horsepower.  I presume that this workload
is different from the typical diskless thin client deployment where the
thin clients are doing lighterweight tasks such as word processing,
Internet browsing, etc.

I've seen thin client approaches such as PXES that use the Windows
Terminal Services, remote X, etc.  I've also seen approaches from
vendors who put a copy of the whole system drive image on a remote
server and the diskless client accesses the system files across the
network.

From your experience, which approach would be the most appropriate for
this deployment?

Please forgive my ignorance, but with the Windows Terminal Server, do
the applications run on the terminal server (where all the thin client
does is draw the windows and take mouse and kb input) -- or does the
thin client read the executable across the network, do all the program
execution locally, and writes output to a shared file system?

My guess is that the former would not work well in my situation.

Thanks!

Dave

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
David D. Egts
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[email protected]


	
		
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