With Dell I'd go for Latitude 5300 2in1 or whatever they're doing in the 7xxx series 2in1 now.
I would never, ever in a million years recommend anything from the Inspiron or XPS ranges for business use. We tested a 3000 series Latitude and it was basically just a re-branded Inspiron.
To answer the initial question, you should be able to fire up most any linux live distro and use lshw to get an inventory of your hardware details.
It's been a while since I've done it, but live boot ubuntu or mint, jump into a terminal and
sudo lshw >> hardware.txt
As much as I'm all for xcp-ng and XO, it might be worth a check with your Citrix rep to see if you have XenServer / Hypervisor (whatever the hell they're calling it now) support as part of your VDI. I know we have certain usage and allocations for the hypervisor based on our XD and XA licensing.
I haven't played with XCP-NG, but one thing that I'll say, having used ESXi in the past and being mostly Citrix for the past few years is that your VMs seem much closer to the metal on vmware. I've never taken the time to get into understanding the differences of the platform internals, but vmware just seems to be snappier and more..... efficient?
Something else to consider is that if you have invested in tools or solutions that use vmware-specific features, (like Veeam B&R) it doesn't transfer to Xen (and my experience is that there's fewer tools available in the market for Xen solutions)
Offline files was enabled at one of my former gigs and it was HELL to troubleshoot with users, mainly 'cause it was all remote, often with inadequate remote assistance tools.
Changing to Ubiquiti is something that we've discussed here. We're currently on Meraki for our APs only (checked the firewalls / security appliances but dodged that bullet)
Does Ubiquiti do the following? (We're currently using these features and having to retrain the users would be a real PITA)
Assuming that the HW is powerful enough the only problem that I've had is my own ProBook with the intel/ATI Hybrid graphics.
@JaredBusch
I hear you, but it's just as much visibility as the opendns option that the OP was looking at if we are looking at an AD-based setup.
@openit Pihole with the upstream DNS of your choice.
Keep in mind that you'll have to either block all dns at the firewall (except the pi-hole) or force all queries to redirect to the pi-hole if you want absolute visibility and control. If you're OK with the possibility of queries bypassing your DNS then this part doesn't need to be dealt with.
All depends on what you want to learn and how much breakage you're willing to deal with.
Everyone on here (myself included) is likely to have a certain bias for their own preferred flavor. Check out distrowatch if you haven't already done so for reviews and information on any of the suggestions offered.
Linux has come a long way from when I started using Slackware back around 2002. From there I went to Kubuntu, Sabayon, Mint and now Manjaro (Cinnamon) on desktop / laptops. Work has been mostly Ubuntu and Debian with some centos and centos-based products (xenserver) in the mix.
To come back to your question, it depends on whether you're looking to learn from a work-skills perspective or personal curiosity. If you want to do a real deep-dive you could do Linux from Scratch, Gentoo or Arch....
My personal recommendation (bias included) is to run Manjaro Cinnamon and use KVM or VirtualBox to experiment with other distros.
Reasons:
So if anyone else jumps down this particular rabbit hole, my hacky workaround is to add this to my auto-join cases:
sed -i -e "s#<LogonCount>999</LogonCount>#<LogonCount>1</LogonCount>#gi" $unattendfile
I've lost track of which distros are using which backends for graphics, but could it be related to xorg vs wayland or something along those lines? Or since this is a system that's been updated, an old or modified config that was needed previously but is causing grief with the latest round of updates.
@Pete-S
That one looks like a dead link, managed to find what I think is the same doc here: https://thinclientbenefits.com/uploads/resources/Guide-to-Microsoft-Windows-Virtual-Client-Licensing.pdf
It makes the argument for something like thin OS or stratodesk that much less interesting if it's ~$100 US per year per device.
@scottalanmiller Does your comment on licensing apply to all VDI or specific to one provider? We're windows / citrix and this is the first time I've heard of additional licensing costs for a non-windows endpoint.
So to answer the central "why this way" question:
We'd been dealing with setting the hostname and joining to domain manually until now, but I'd been hoping to automate that part of things as we have a few remote offices where it can be a struggle to get help in a timely manner.
Does anyone know of any resources that explain the inner-workings of MDT? I'm just about at my wit's end trying to tweak our build and deploy process.
Basically here are the elements that I'm trying to get to work together:
When trying to deploy I keep getting errors about LTIBootstrap.vbs
If I take the references to LTIBootstrap out of the unattend file then the build process doesn't work
With almost everything working (deploy with auto-rename and auto domain-join) , MDT's auto admin logon settings don't get removed like they're supposed to...
Does anyone know what purposes are of the 2 different unattend.xml (panther vs sysprep)?
My apologies if this is rambling.... any help is appreciated
@scottalanmiller said in Newb: Looking for advice.:
@notverypunny said in Newb: Looking for advice.:
You've mentioned Citrix, which makes me wonder if they're looking to do Citrix Cloud.
Still just XenApp, just hosted by Citrix.
Yep, but our main / lead Citrx guy here has been back and forth with their support trying to get acceptable performance compared to our on-prem setup. We're looking at the possibility of using it for XenDesktop in a DR capacity, but from what I've been hearing the performance isn't even acceptable from a temporary / DR perspective.
So my initial comment was meant to be more tongue-in-cheek than anything, I wasn't trying to bash or belittle anyone, my apologies if it wasn't taken as intended.
I'm seeing a lot of advice that seems to be based on assumptions.
My first order of business in your shoes would be to understand the reasons for the current situation
The information you've given helps explain the current IT reality of the company. My concern would be that if management has SaaS in mind as opposed to migrating the existing workloads then looking at colo would seem to be a moot point. You've mentioned Citrix, which makes me wonder if they're looking to do Citrix Cloud.
Sounds like someone's taking to ML for a homework assignment?
Look at processes on the moodle box? If you have a rough idea of what the resource usage should be you can compare that with actual usage and dig into anything that's out of spec.