On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Ljubomir Ljubojevic centos@plnet.rs wrote:
If you have a company with 40-50 workstations with 32-bit CPU and 1GB RAM, how would you provide all 40-50 via VM's?
Depending on what they are doing, there's a good chance they would be better off running one or two modern servers with some sort of thin client access. The existing workstations would probably work well enough running NX, x2go, etc. although you don't get any power savings that way.. Depending on the usage, the host side could either be simple multiuser access or be carved into VMs per user, group, or function.
Developing or poor countries use what they can, some even import old PC's from developed countries. Even in my country there are many people with 32-bit CPU's and 512-1024MB RAM. Some even only have 256MB. It works for what they need so they do not want to spend their money if they do not have to.
Actually, I'm with you on this. Years ago I used a re-spin called K12LTSP that was maintained up through CentOS5. You'd install it on a host with 2 NICs and it would come up working to PXE-boot thin clients on one interface, providing LAN/internet access on the other interface. It wanted to boot the same kernel on the clients as the server, so it was problematic for older client hardware when RHEL dropped 32-bit support in 6.x. There was some effort to package LTSP5 for 6.x as simple RPMs but I don't think it has been as popular - or as usable, partly because it is more complicated to set up and partly because it didn't work for the old hardware typically used as clients. (One of its other features was that it came with working java, flash, and a few other packages pointed at working update repositories back when that wasn't easy...).