[Spice-devel] Spice thin clients

[Frediano Ziglio]

> We're thinking in mounting a PC lab with circa 20 PCs, but by using thin
> clients.

> What we'd like to do is, one big KVM server with the Windows VMs, and each PC
> client to access them as a thin client, using either cheap small PCs or
> Raspberry Pi. Preferably the later.

> But I'm lost as to how to even begin. Should I just mount a minimalistic
> command-line-only Linux distribution in each client, then somehow make it
> automatically start the corresponding VM via virt-viewer?

> Or are there ways for the PC client to be OS-less and somehow directly boot a
> VM via PXE or something?

> Thanks.

Hi,
  hard to give a reply. There are different things to consider from maintenance
to costs to planning. Taking aside the server planning (I suppose from 20 Windows
VMs won't be such demanding, more office jobs).
For clients there are already made solution (one I found is
http://www.jieyung.com/index.php?lang=en, didn't try it), software solutions:
- https://ltsp.github.io/
- http://www.thinstation.org/
- https://drbl.org/
Personally I've seen custom made solutions based on Ubuntu and "classic" thin PCs
with PXE and NFS.
Take into account your network (NFS will consume bandwidth and could slow down
while having an internal storage could make updates more complicate).
Take into account the support and maintenance (an already made solution usually
move part of the maintenance time efforts to external company with all the
pros and cons).
I would avoid a "start from scratch" approach, could be very time consuming and
hard to maintain, if one strong requirement is cheap clients at least I would
try an already made software solution adapting it.

Frediano