Fat and thin computing
We maintain several traditional computer labs on campus. These are your run-of-the-mill labs with PCs as you would expect, imaged with our standard lab software build.
Over the last year, two of our labs have gone in completely opposite directions. One uses high end workstations with demanding software, where each desk is packed with specialized peripherals. The other contains thin client terminals with just enough brains to run a remote desktop session to a virtual machine on a server. Both have been an interesting exercise in fulfilling the needs of faculty and students.
On the thick side, we have the Fine Arts Technology, or FAT lab. The FAT lab offers software and devices for audio recording/editing, photography editing, video recording and drafting/design. This lab has a special place in our hearts because we have spent so much time in it!
Our Fine Arts division chose a vendor to build this lab, one that supposedly specialized in labs for music and art instruction. To make a long story short, the vendor laid a great big egg, leaving our IT staff to pick up the pieces.
The eventual result is a set of dual quad-core workstations, each with 8GB of memory, SAS disks and dual displays. They dual boot 32 and 64 bit Windows XP because some of the software must run on a 32 bit platform (M-Audio’s Pro Tools and Adobe Premiere CS3) while some can take advantage of 64 bit processing and memory over 4GB (Adobe Photoshop CS4, Autodesk’s AutoCAD). The vendor’s biggest mistake (and there were several) was thinking that everything would run OK on 64 bit Windows.
On the lighter side, we have a lab space that is used as much as a classroom as it is a computer lab. It was a traditional lab in the past, but needed to be quieter and have a smaller footprint on the desks so that it could be used for lectures. We retrofitted this one with thin clients and began calling it the THIN lab.
The THIN lab is used for Business and Economics courses. It once had standard desktop PCs, each with a flat panel monitor sitting on top of it. This arrangement brought complaints from faculty about not being able to make eye contact with students during lectures, not to mention that students would sometimes turn the computers on and use them.
This lab became our testing ground for thin client computing. We removed the desktop PCs and installed Wyse S10 thin clients at each station. We took the “poor man’s” approach, installing the free VMWare ESXi solution on some older servers and creating a virtual machine out of our lab image to back each client. When a Wyse client boots, it gets its configuration from an FTP server and opens an RDP session to an XP lab image VM.
The experience is quite similar to sitting at a standard lab PC, with the obvious exceptions that video and audio do not perform well over a remote session. We were willing to take that chance because we knew that the software required for the courses did not make use of multimedia. Also, the lab is lightly used by students outside of class time.
This setup lowered the monitors down on the desk, freed up writing space for students and completely silenced the room (the S10 terminals have no fan or disk). Some courses do make use of the clients during class time, as there is auditing simulation and tax software installed on their VMs. We completed this installation over holiday break, so we are just starting to get some feedback on the “thin experience”.
A few months ago, I wrote a blog entry about how I didn’t like technology anymore because it was just too complicated and hard to keep up with. Indeed there are days when it feels like there is no end to the amount of work that we must do just to keep everything up and running.
Thankfully, putting together these two labs has reminded me of why I enjoy it. It is heartening to see how technology can enhance teaching and learning in so many ways. It really makes me feel good about the job and proud of the work that we’ve done.