Thin Clients in Industrial Environment

I am looking into deploying thin clients into an industrial environment and am considering alternatives to manage the thin client infrastructure.

People have recommended Citrix, VMWare and ThinManager and am trying to understand the pros/cons of each.

If you have experience with all of any of these, that would be very helpful. I have a small budget for this and if you have a bit of time for sharing your experience, I am willing to compensate. Please PM me and we can exchange contacts.

Thanks!

Try: http://www.advancedhmi.com/, this one is free.
You did not mention plc brand.

Rockwell has a system in place for this, PlantPAx.

I think the images they offer are free, but you obviously need licenses for the software that the images contain.

http://www.rockwellautomation.com/g.../process-solutions/plantpax-capabilities.page

We just put thin clients all through our plant, in the past couple months, and we use Citrix. They're not for machine control. They're for inventory, production management, maintenance tracking, etc.

My colleagues have been deploying Arista AP-3500 thin clients with ThinManager.

We connect them to ordinary Dell 2240 touchscreen monitors, and use them to show the remote desktops of virtualized FactoryTalk View SE clients running on a hefty Windows Server 2008 R2 based Terminal Server purring away in a cabinet adjacent to the machine system.

This architecture has been very solid for us; it cuts deployment time dramatically and in our environment (a controlled contamination room) the Dell monitors run fine.

One wrinkle we didn't expect at first; we had to get some specific SELV-rated power supplies so that they had the proper insulation so that we could source them from 480V 3-phase and still connect them to consumer electronics (the Dell monitors).

But I'm not the one who installed them so I can't give you details on cost and the various challenges they encountered. Budget wasn't our principal consideration; implementation, upgrade, and deployment time were.

VMWare

We use VMWare as our visualized servers, from all our operator stations and control work stations we use the Dell range of thin clients and RDP sessions to establish connection to the visualized servers.

We have done numerous pilot projects on using Thinmanager within the environment and found some limitation to our very specific requirements. It does provide very good functionality though when it comes to mouse/keyboard sharing and deployment layout from various servers.

The benefit of using the Thin client hardware really becomes an asset as our infrastructure team does not have to manage an OS and all the company policies that go with in regards to anti-virus, windows updates and the likes.

They are easy to swop out and configure when they fail (not that they generally do).

We have settled on the Dell Wyse range as they cover what we need.

sym_man said:

Rockwell has a system in place for this, PlantPAx.

I think the images they offer are free, but you obviously need licenses for the software that the images contain.

http://www.rockwellautomation.com/g.../process-solutions/plantpax-capabilities.page

Click to expand...

It's not just the licenses. PAX is a real controller memory pig.

You will likely have to jump up a processor size if you use very many PAX AOIs.

Years ago I did a system with 3 HMI terminals and used ThinManager. It sounded like a good concept for the application, but in reality was not so good. There was no cost savings when comparing to using full thick clients, but quite the opposite. The terminals with the proprietary firmware was maybe 5% less than an exact same hardware as a full PC system. But it wasn't just the terminals, it also required a fairly powerful server to run the thin clients. Essentially the server takes all of the load and the thin client just acts like a monitor and mouse. Then licensing costs started adding up when buying the ThinManager. Not only do you pay for ThinManager licensing, you are also required to buy Microsoft terminal service licensing.

The selling point was ease of replacing hardware. The problem with that was having hardware with the ThinManager BIOS/firmware. You get locked into this proprietary platform. On top of it, typical maintenance men cannot replace terminals because it requires you to login to the server to acknowledge the new terminal was replacing the missing one.

The lesson I learned was to just use full panel PCs in a mult-HMI system.

Now this experience was based on a system done over 10 years, so things may have changed.

How many thin clients are you going to install now? HMI stations or for engineering stations?
Those likely will affect your choice.

ThinManager works with Microsoft terminal server (RDP) or VMware ESXi servers; they just specialize in "managing/configuring" that for industrial automation. But essentially ThinManager is an add-on to make life easier.
That option is not low-cost as you pay for both MS/VMware servers and ThinManager.

Having VMware to host the client sessions offers so many advantages. I haven't tried/seen the MS version for virtual PCs in actual use yet. But the point is using virtualized client sessions is a big help when deploying/recovering/maintaining those.


Try to avoid being vendor locked. Ex. In 10 years when we need to fix/replace can we easily buy new thin-client hardware? Who will we have (access to) that knows how to make updates or changes?

widelto said:

Try: http://www.advancedhmi.com/, this one is free.
You did not mention plc brand.

Click to expand...

This has nothing to do with a thin client environment.

Anyway, it's really going to come down to size and complexity of your install. I think ThinManger is not needed if you have a single application and only a few clients. You can use thin clients and RDS (Remote Desktop Services, formerly Terminal Services) within a Windows Server OS and get the results you need. As arlenjacobs said, it's really just an add-on that you may not need right away.

For a thin client environment, you really need to focus on the server side and how that will be implemented and managed. Just about anything can act as if it were a 'thin client' just by launching and RDP session. Once you start to centralize the SCADA environment you have to make sure there is 100% uptime. Traditional thick clients who each ran independently were inherently 'redundant', if one went down simply walk to the next to do what you need to do. In a thin client environment, if your SCADA server goes down, all clients are down. This is were virtualization provides so many benefits. A virtualized environment handles redundancy much better than redundancy options from any SCADA manufacturer. Plus server hardare is so powerful they can run multiple virtualized servers and save big money on server hardware. A few physical servers could run 10+ virtual servers, give you redundancy and handle a bunch of clients.

I just started working at a new place, it's by far the biggest and most automated plant I have ever been in. I saw the architecture today, at least 30 virtualized servers running on 8-10 physical servers with a huge SAN. Crazy impressive. The plant floor to the offices are all connected, so anyone on any computer can launch a client. Easily 50+ clients running at any given time. VMWare, ThinManager, System Platform. I just see dollar signs everywhere.

VMWare/Hyper-V as the hypervisor, I'm only familiar with ThinManager. Some discussion here: http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=86640

Paully's5.0 said:

VMWare, ThinManager, System Platform. I just see dollar signs everywhere.

VMWare/Hyper-V as the hypervisor, I'm only familiar with ThinManager. Some discussion here: http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=86640

Click to expand...

Yes that setup would not be a cheap, but i think worth the investment for big companies with complex automation requirements.

We're coming full circle starting with mainframes and terminals, to independent stations, back to servers and thin clients. DCS vendors (ABB, Schneider/Invensys are two that come to mind) are encouraging the use of thin client solutions now. The initial cost and complexity increases, but I say that's a decent trade for uptime and maintenance (replacing failed drives, re-imaging drives, etc...).


Side thought: the job description of "Controls engineer" has definitely creeped into industrial IT territory depending upon the plant's networking architecture.

I was about to start a thread asking this... sorry for the hijack...How long does it take a thin client to boot up compared to a... fat client? Are there IP rated ones suitable for food/washdown environments?

I like the Thin Manager solution and have many installs of it and IMHO for industrial HMI's clients it brings more to the table than just using Citrix or VMware alone.

I use thin manager on Stratus Servers so it's very redundant and thin Manager has software redundancy also. If you are really feel the need you can have a second Stratus redundant server onsite or offsite and also have VMware Vsphere redundancy setup on the hypervisor.

I have done this setup once for an application that can never go down.

Here are some Thin Manager features and Relevance is also a very nice feature setup to have Mobile on your factory floor.

http://www.thinmanager.com/products/features.php

http://www.thinmanager.com/productivity/

Stratus Servers

http://www.stratus.com/solutions/platforms/ftserver/

Follow up

Thank you for the replies. Quite helpful so far. And food for thought for us.

A few of you suggested using ThinManager. Would I be able to have comparable functionality with VMWare Horizon View and/or Citrix XenApp? Or does ThinManager give me specific functionality?