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3.2. Server Requirements
A Linux distribution based on GLIBC 2.2.5 (built with GCC 3.X) or newer, with RPM or dpkg/alien support.
or
Sun Solaris® 8 or newer.
Python 2.3 or newer.
The distribution must be supported by Webmin.
python-ldap (only required when using eDirectory integration, see Section 9.4.5, “ Using Novell eDirectory with ThinLinc ”)
CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) (only required when using nearest printer or local printers, see Chapter 5, Printer Features )
A web server with support for SSL and CGI scripts (only required when using Browser Clients)
When using the ThinLinc Desktop Customizer, KDE version 3.2 (or later), or GNOME version 2.10 (or later) is required.
As long as your platform fulfills the requirements above, ThinLinc should work as expected. As part of the quality assurance work for each release, ThinLinc is tested extensively on a few platforms. For this release of ThinLinc, the list of such platforms are:
Red Hat® Enterprise Linux 5.2 (in 32-bit mode)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP2® (in 32-bit mode)
Ubuntu® 8.04 (in 32-bit mode)
Sun Solaris® 10
The amount of computer resources needed to run a ThinLinc cluster varies greatly with the number of users, the type of hardware used for the servers, the application mix run by the users and the type of users. Trying to estimate the number of servers needed for a specific cluster is not something that can be done using a predefined table of facts. Instead decisions should be made based on benchmarks and experience.
Below, we will try to give some ideas on what kind of resources are needed based on customer experience. With time and experience from your own cluster with your own application set, you will work out your own set of figures.
It is important to remember that the ThinLinc load balancing feature makes it easy to add another server when the need arises. Start out with a number of servers and add more as the load increases.
There are several types of resources needed in a ThinLinc cluster.
Disk
About 20MiB of disk are needed for the software and data being part of ThinLinc. Each active session also requires a very small amount of data (normally less than 100KiB) for storage of session data and the session log. In addition to that, there must be disk available for the operating system, the applications users run and logs.
Also remember that there must be space for an appropriate amount of swap. Disk performance on the swap area must be high not to make performance go down when the swap is used.
CPU
The amount of CPU is very hard to estimate as it depends completely on the set of applications run by the users, and also on how active the users are as well as which response times are accepted by the users. A server that without problem copes with 100 users running Openoffice calc updating a spreadsheat now and then will cope with a considerably lower amount of concurrent users if they are accessing internet sites with streaming video.
When ThinLinc is used as a Windows Terminal Server frontend, meaning that the only application run is rdesktop, experience shows the amount of CPU needed is around 50-100MHz per active user.
For a full desktop (KDE or Gnome) with typical office and internet applications (OpenOffice, Firefox, some graphics program and users visiting multimedia-intensive web pages, the amount of CPU needed is somewhere between 150 and 300MHz per active user.
The CPU figures above are based on experience from customers running Intel Xeon 3.4GHz CPUs. For other types of CPU, the figures should be adjusted accordingly.
Memory
The amount of memory, just as the amount of CPU, is also very dependent on type application set and how active the users are. Also, the amount of memory needed will depend on the response times your users find acceptable. If the system needs to use a lot of swap, it will take longer time to switch back to inactive programs. Swap use should be minimized as use of the swap also means that the CPU needs to work to shuffle data to and from disk.
When ThinLinc is used as a Windows Terminal Server frontend, with rdesktop being the only application run, experience shows that the amount of memory needed per user is 10-20MiB.
For a full desktop (KDE or Gnome) with typical office and internet applications (OpenOffice, Firefox, etc.), expect the need for 100-150MiB of memory per user.
Microsoft Windows (using Microsoft Terminal Server or Citrix MetaFrame)
UNIX (character and graphical)
Linux (character and graphical)
HTML
Java