My company is looking at desktop virtualization, and are planning to move all of the desktop compute resources into the server room or data center, and provide users with thin clients for access.
In most cases, a simple VNC or Remote Desktop solution is adequate, but some users are running visualizations that require 3D capability--something that VNC and Remote Desktop cannot support.
Rather than making an exception and providing desktop machines for these users, complicating out rollout and future operations, we are considering adding servers with GPUs, and using HP's Remote Graphics to provide access from the thin client.
The demo version appears to work acceptably, but there is a bit of a learning curve, it's not clear how well it would work for multiple simultaneous sessions, and it's not clear if it would be a good solution to apply to non-3D sessions. If possible, as with the hardware, we want to deploy a single software solution instead of a mishmash.
If anyone has had experience managing a large installation of HP Remote Graphics, I would appreciate any feedback you can provide.
Edit: In particular, we're interested in feedback regarding:
- User training
- Performance/bandwidth utilization
- Operational issues
- Interoperability and integration
- Security management
You are done. Bad decision hitting technical reality.
Powerful 3d is not something you will for quite some time be able to handle efficiently though a network and remote, especially not if you talk remote data center (local server room may work - there you can have loads of bandwidth gong to the clients).
Remote Desktop on 2008 R2 server with Sp1 (due in the next months) will allow some acceleration, but depending on what you call powerful 3d, that still wont work.
Thin clients are meant for "lower end" applications. Sometimes you can stretch it. For example, my company is using remote virtual workstations (Windows 7) on Hyper-V for real time financial trading (and we talk of running 3+ screens at 1600x1200 resolution showing real time financial updates all the time). This is pretty much as far as you get - we think of splitting presentation and trading and keep trading remote (terminal services published app), but charting local.
3d would really stretch it. As do complex animations. You will run into problems with encoding (using CPU), latency and bandwidth at some point.
You have the classical case here for real higher end workstations. Pushing these end points into thin clients for the sake of ease of management / deployment is building a house from the roof. It simply wont work. Technical reality.
You might want to check out spice - it supports remote graphics as in watching movies and flash videos remotely. afaik photoshop and autocad worked pretty well too.
RHEV comes with spice built in by the way.