Re: Clouds and thin clients at home.
- From: "J.O. Aho" <user@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2011 10:16:51 +0200
Gordon wrote:
"J.O. Aho"<user@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:98nhrpFbg7U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
Gordon wrote:Can it be done?
Buy a big heavy duty machine.
Install Linux as the base OS.
Use Virtual Box to create various instances of Win or linux.
communicate with them via thin or "zero" clients.
Basicly one machine with multiple heads.
Not really sure what you want to accomplish with this.
You want one machine with as many keyboards/mouses/monitors as there
is VMs or you want to use one instance which can hook up to which ever
VM you want to use for the moment? Assuming you are talking about GUI
based instances.
Yeah. Maybe a bit longer explaination would be in order.
The machines in this house are all getting a bit old. Right now
there are two 2.5Ghz machines that get the most use. The 1Ghz
Athlon and the 650Mhz machine were packed up when we moved
last year and were not set back up. So I was thinking about where
to go in the future with the computers in this house. There are
4 users (me, my wife, and the two kids [8 and 15]) and we share the
two machines that are currently set up.
So I began shopping around for a new machine and man are they
powerful.
This really depends on what you are doing, for surfing the net, word processing and such trivial tasks, yes they are powerful, but for those who like to play mainstream games they tend to not be as powerful.
Don't know about your kids, if they play a lot of games on the computer or if they use a game console for that, but if they are in for gaming on microsoft platform, then a VM will not do as well, this due the lack of hardware rendered 3D.
Then I remember reading about a couple of linux
distros that allow you to set up an enterprise level cloud
computing system.
IMHO and experience, cloud setups are usually for allowing you to fast and simple throw up servers, these don't require any graphical or in those cases when using something like microsoft platform you don't need anything more than painstaking slow 2D.
One solution for you could be to setup a Linux machine which acts like a server, each of you have an account on that machine, then use the current machines as thin clients (for faster boot up, you could use a small SSD which only contains a minimalistic Linux installation with X Windows).
If need be, create those microsoft VMs, and let the user start/stop them by need instead of having them running all the time. I can tell that Disk IOPS may make your system to ge a lot slower if you have a high number of VMs running all the time (I have noticed this myself, where my NFS server also run a number of VMs, copy a file to the NFS took quite long time while all VMs run, while when none are running it's quite fast). Of course you could spend a lot of money to get a system with a high IOPS, but I don't think most home users would.
This solution would be easy to setup and simple to maintain as you have one Linux to keep up to date (as Linux is a multi-user distribution, I don't see any point in having one each or something like that, just gives you more administration work for no gain).
--
//Aho
.
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