I have a room with 30 thinclients currently running Windows with the possibility to open RDP sessions.

The current setup using VMWare is slow even for 2D content. That is why I want to replace it with Proxmox. What can I expect? I suspect the current setup is using SAN, I want to go ZFS on local drives.

I experimented in a homelab on KVM to see how fast the VMs can become. With 8 cores Google Earth becomes somewhat usable over RDP. But imagine 30 students using it on the same VM. The VM is Debian 13 btw.

I also experiemented with spice and 3D acceleration, but it works only locally and does not support multiple logins. What other options do I have. Even when I setup the VM to use virgl it uses software rendering over RDP. I thought of replacing the Windows on the thinclients with Linux, but then I would need individual VMs for every student and a secure spice session. Is that even possible? I would need a potent GPU in the server, maybe more than one. Is a 64 core CPU and 512 GB RAM enough for 30 students?

I’ve read that proxmox uses temporary .vv files for noVNC in the browser. I hope this can be setup permanently to be accessible over the network.

Any advice or new ideas are welcome!

  • stevestevesteve@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    16 days ago

    What do the students need to do?

    You’ve basically just asked “is an XL tshirt big enough for me” without telling us how big you are.

    • poinck@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      10 days ago

      They need to do GIS (QGIS, R and Python), which is doable with only 2D, but sometimes they rely on some webapps that would benefit from from webgl being not slow.