Virtual computing VNC options?


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I run a VNC server for work, technically I run 4 of them at different locations. Each pc is used for charting purposes for our company, some are backups in case one goes down. Each pc is also setup with 4 to 8 virtual monitors using multiple VGA dummies to give us extra monitors without needing physical monitors or wasting space and money. They work perfect for our needs. The prob is our company has been steadily growing and the more people on the servers the slower it starts to get. Short of buying new computers I want to find out what other options might work for us.

I dont know a lot about virtual computing in terms of what is offered. What Id would like is a basic windows system that would offer multiple monitor options, something like 4-10 would be nice, if more then great. Our programs used on these machines are windows only. Another option would be guaranteed remote restart. We have a number of problems with out current setup one being that the our servers are located at people's homes. If there is a server issue and a restart is needed, if no one is home, the server is basically dead till it can be restarted manually. The other needed aspect is that I need to run a VNC server on it for access. The people I work with are not the sharpest tools in the shed. They know how to trade but asking them to try to log into a system through anything less then a simple one click solution would be impossible. It would be easier teaching a frog to speak English.

So that's where Im at, Im looking for options or at least someone to point me in the right direction to a server company that might be able to help.

Thanks

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I looked over the multipoint server, that wouldnt work for us. Correct me if Im wrong but that gives each user their own desktop. The way we are setup to work, we all share one desktop. This is because we are sharing one program, the charting program. Our charting service costs us $300 a month per user. At 48 users, thats almost $200k a year for charting service. That's why I created the VNC server to cut that cost down while still giving everyone access to the same charting info. The multipoint server wouldnt work because the charting program can only be logged into by one user at a time. So the VNC gives virtual access to that one user account.

Each server we have has 4-8 virtual monitors. I took a screenshot of the server Im running to give a better idea of how we are setup. The blue line shows the break for each monitor.

001xw.png

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logmein free - can restart remotely at anytime as long as there is an internet connection and the utility is talking to logmein servers. so can teamviewer for that matter. You are probably in violation of the charting program EULA. Technically you could do the same with a terminal server and flip between TS sessions.

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Do your users need to interact with the system when they log in, or do they just need to view the data?

Because if most of the users are only viewing the data (and not interacting with the system), perhaps it would improve performance to just periodically capture a screenshot and store it on a web server, or perhaps capture the screen as a video stream and pass it to a dedicated system that streams to many users. Then, only if they need to interact with the screen, they will log in through VNC. To make it easy to use you could perhaps make a web page that by default is view-only (using the screenshots or the video stream), and then make a link called "Interact" which would then load a Java-based VNC client that would allow the users to interact, and on the Java client page, add a "Logout" or something button to switch back to the view-only page.

I'm just thinking of this because I can't see how multiple users are supposed to interact simultaneously with a system designed for only 1 mouse and 1 keyboard, and I'm thinking that capturing the screen is less demanding on the system than trying to support multiple VNC viewers, though I'm not sure about that. However (esp. for the screenshot method) I expect the refresh rate to be less than real-time - perhaps only once every few seconds - for this to work, which might not be good enough for the traders.

TightProjector ($99) would probably not work as it is intended for PCs on the same LAN, but you could check it out nonetheless - it claims to use UDP multicasting to efficiently stream a screen of data to many clients.

As for "guaranteed remote restart" that is kinda difficult if you want to be 100% sure of a restart, because any software solutions are likely to work only when the computer is running normally (i.e. not hung). Perhaps you can check if the computers have some particular Intel motherboards with Intel AMT, if I'm not mistaken that is a motherboard-based remote management system for enterprises, and if you configure it properly you can force restart the computer regardless of the OS state. Otherwise, if your computers have the option (usually in the BIOS) or by default will power on when you plug it in, you can get specialized hardware devices that allow you to control the power supply remotely. You can then simulate a unplug and plug in process remotely and reboot the PC.

I suppose you could also try to see where the bottleneck is that is resulting in a slowdown. Because if you have multiple simultaneous VNC connections to one VNC server (in view-only mode) as I assume, there should not be much performance issues in increasing the number of connections since the VNC server only needs to capture and compress the screen once. As such, I'm thinking that there is a possibility the PCs may be facing a bottleneck in the upload bandwidth on the Internet connection (since you mentioned the PCs are in people's homes), as more users connected means that the VNC server has to send the same screen data to more computers through the home Internet connection. If that is the case, upgrading the PCs won't work either. You just have to either reduce the VNC image quality settings, or upgrade the Internet connections of where the PCs are at.

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The users need to interact with the data. Plotting trend iines and other viewing other technical analysis options as well as updating their specific page. While it's not against the EULA rules its not supported either, hence why we have to share the one mouse/keyboard. With so many of our traders viewing it at different times, they have learned to share well with each other.

Im sure the pc has a bottleneck itself, its almost 2 yrs old now, but this is also at my home so Im sure my internet also is part of the issue. Just another reason I wanted to look at hosting options given that it would be better equipped to handle the traffic.

Im waiting on a call from rackspace about checking out their virtual desktop options. At the very least I might have to upgrade my internet speeds and get a new pc. Just wasnt sure if I was completely missing out on other options that I didnt know about.

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Well for a start you could drastically reduce bandwidth by reducing colour depth, from what the App looks like you could probably do it with only 8 colours and use a high contrast Windows theme to clean up the Windows borders.

Then look at using Meeting software, WebEx, GoToMeeting, etc. I also think that a VNC repeater might be of some use to multiplex sessions if I understand it correctly (never used it before), check it out.

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