Does LTSP actually work? [LWN.net]

Does LTSP actually work?

Posted Sep 29, 2006 22:44 UTC (Fri) by amikins (guest, #451)
In reply to: Does LTSP actually work? by kbob
Parent article: The future of the Linux Terminal Server Project (Linux.com)

LTSP can certainly be cost effective.

The first thing to note is that there is nothing that requires the actual 'server' portion to be a single monolithic machine. It can be a cluster itself, which can yield more efficient scaling of processing capacity versus cost. It gets trickier to ensure that task load is distributed correctly, but it's quite feasible.

The second is the utilization of local resources.. In many settings where a terminal server style approach makes sense, very few of the users are actually making use of most of their resources for consistently long periods of time. If every single user needed 100% of their ram, and most of their hard disk space potential, then yes, you'd need to scale the server accordingly. In practice, enough users are going to be underutilizing their portion of the resources that pooling them together is going to be a net win. Per user, you won't need as much ram and hard disk space as you would locally, both because of the above factors, and because of duplicated resources.

Additionally, there's data integrity issue. If all data is stored in one central location, extensible redundant storage becomes more managable.. And it's amazing just how much disk space really goes unused in a lot of 'low end' workstations.

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