Hello,
Just want to say this up front…this is not a question on how to by-pass Microsoft Licensing. If the best solution warrants us paying, we will pay. But if there is a way for us to save some money and use existing licensing/Workstation O/S’s that we’ve already paid for I’d like to explore those options as well.
So here’s the scenario…
In our lab we have a caustic (Dusty and Acidic) environment for our hardware where our PC’s don’t last very long and need to be replaced. Each workstation runs Windows XP. We run one Windows application that does not work over Wine so we need Windows for our Workstations. Attached to each of these workstations is a balance for measuring weight connected via serial cable as well as a USB attached barcode scanner.
Big Assumption:
I’m assuming I’ll be able to send data from my Serial Attached Balance (Serial over IP maybe) and attach my USB connected barcode scanner over IP (USB over IP). Pretty big assumptions I know…but I’ll keep researching how to do satisfy those requirements…so onto my questions for this post.
I see two possible scenarios for us:
Since we already own the Windows XP licenses my thought is to keep the Windows XP workstations and P2V them to run on in our KVM (Proxmox) virtual environment. We have two Host Servers with more than enough Ram and horsepower to run our 17 Workstations as well as other Virtual Servers. I then use an LTSP Virtual Server to serve up an Ubuntu O/S to each Workstations Thin Client (PXE booting into the LTSP Server). I’ll have a script that runs when the person logs into their LTSP desktop that automatically RDP into their respective Windows XP VM. In this way if the workstation breaks down, we drop in another, set it to PXE boot and we are up and running again. Since we paid for each of these Windows XP O/S I’m thinking I won’t be going against Windows Licensing by doing this.
Or…
I could Setup a Microsoft Server 2008 with Terminal Services Cals and user cals (which we will buy) for each workstation to login to the Server to run their application. I would again use inexpensive workstation terminals to RDP into the Terminal Servers. I suppose I could again use PXE boot into a LTSP Terminal Server desktop session for each workstation that will RDP into the Terminal Services Session.
For both ideas I could also boot off the inexpensive workstations with either a desktop installed on the workstation (Linux) or a livecd/usb but I’d like to make this a simple as possible process to replace the workstations.
Which do you think would work best for us in our environment. Keeping in mind my solution is designed to keep costs to a minimum, use existing licenses where possible and give us a quick as possible solution to replace a failed workstation.
Thank you.