WAAS (Windows as a Service)

[BrentfromZulu]

Here is a thought. What about a service where you host Windows 7 VM's at your business and they connect through Thin Clients. There are a lot of benefits in my mind.

Clients will use normal stuff (UTM, Switch, WAP, Printer), while you get a beefy server and host a pile of Windows Virtual Machines. You could host everything and it would be super easy to manage. Of course, you would also be responsible.

Benefits:
Rarely have to go on site
Easy to "Remote" In
Easy to deploy software
Easy to image machine and re-deploy
Easier to fix Virus Issues (or just create a new vm)


What do y'all think? And, what would be a good/fair price for this service. I was thinking $100 - $125 per Windows install, but I would like to know what y'all think is fair.

 

[PBComputer]

Amazon already have a service simular. http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/

I've still to look at it.

Paul

 

[Vicenarian]

One thing that might be a pain is Microsoft licensing, etc.

 

[Markverhyden]

Remote thin clients have not really caught on for a number of reasons. One main one is loosing connectivity. Every site would need to have backup circuits that perform the same as the primary.

Since you can't rely on the same ISP for the second connection you have to look for another alternative. On top of that you would need a good sized pipe. So many locations might need to have channel bonded connections. This is available with WWAN as well as T1's and DSL.

Great idea but I don't think would you get enough volume to justify the expense.

 

[BrentfromZulu]

Remote thin clients have not really caught on for a number of reasons. One main one is loosing connectivity. Every site would need to have backup circuits that perform the same as the primary.

True, and I would suggest that those same users have a backup ISP, even if it just 4g failover. At some point if you are using hosted services, it is best practice to have a second ISP.

 

[BrentfromZulu]

Amazon already have a service simular. http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/

I've still to look at it.

Paul

I forgot they did that. I just looked over it and it does sound pretty compelling. However, I would say that all of that plus backups, the value is very similar. Plus, throw in support costs, it's very comparable.

 

[SAG]

As I mentioned in another thread... are you really going to convince someone to buy a computer "the thin client" and then tell them it is totally unusable unless they pay you a monthly fee?
Seriously, that is what the lay person will think. When you say "thin client" they think you are talking about losing weight - they have no clue what it means, nor do they usually care, they just bought a computer and it doesn't work.

Plenty of places do this now, local datacenter to me sells this sort of service, with the VMs sitting on big-ass SSD datastores with plenty of cpu cycles and memory... but not alot of takers.

Take into account that you are now responsible for everything, and I mean EVERYTHING! - Audio on that youtube video being redirected over RDP jumbled? Fix it! I don't care what the problem is, you sold me this service now make it work like you said! What do you mean I can plug my flash drive in and have it pop up a window? I have to do WHAT to load this CD? And so on and so forth until someone gets strangled and beaten.

 

[pceinc]

What you are referring to is a private cloud solution. We have experience in this model through a solution we bought into about 2 years ago called Smart Style Office from Zenith Infotech. What I can tell you from our experience is unless you have tons of money or investors don't even think about it. Zenith Infotech spent 10's of millions of dollars and they could not get it right despite them totally revamping the solution to use Hyper-V and VMWARE as the hypervisor instead of Virtualbox which is what the original solution was built on. Don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic model and has a place in our industry but not for us little guys.

I had 1.5 years of misery supporting a client on Zenith's platform before we had to yank it out and put desktops back in place. I've thought about posting a thread on it in the forums but I doubt there are any others companies in here that have heard of or used it. I only know of one other company that had a similar fate and they were in NZ. We communicated our issues and used that as leverage with Zenith but ultimately we both had to pull the solution.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

Can see for servers such as GoDaddy or MS Azure does, but not for workstations. Problem with cloud is if you lose connection, you are sunk. If you've got local workstations, at least you can do something.

 

[joydivision]

We had this at school in the mid 1990s!!! It was a token ring network with about 200 computers, all 486 DX2-66 systems with 8MB of RAM.

Windows 3.1 was hosted via a sever via Novell Netware and it meant that the IT techs had to almost zero maintenance on the desktops. It was actually very reliable too, but the entire operating system was only like 20MB including office so very different to today.

Each machine also had a local copy of Windows which gave me a lot of fun. We used to install games on them etc