About 7 years ago, I put in a W2012 Server Infrastructure (Now W2016) for a small (<$5MM) 3PL company. They have (2) locations with most users on prem. The owner had a small budget and I didn't have a lot to work with.
I ended up putting in VMWARE ESXi (I think v5 at the time, now running v6.7) running on an Old Dell R720 and a newer R730. It is primarily running VCSA managing four VMs (VCSA, an appication server (RDS Gateway), a F&P Server / DC, and a backup DC. Backups have been being done by VEEAM B&R to two Synology on PREM devices (DS412 and DS920 backup jobs & backup copy jobs) with periodic manual VM Copy to An AWS S3 bucket for off prem storage. Clients are running a variety of wickedly old Dell desktops as "thin clients". All users pretty much log in using MSTSC/RDP to connect to the AppServer (RDS), work with browser and MS Office Apps, have file / folder access to the F&P Server. Most printing is done to local TCP/IP Laser printers and Zebra Label Printers.
The setup has mostly worked well for them. They are centralized, secure, and with RDP can access pretty much from anywhere, though 99% of the time it's from the warehouses (on prem access). he's been able to keep his desktop costs down to almost nothing by using the PCs as thin clients, and his management costs MTM are very low in managing (2x ESXi hosts and a small number of VMs). BTW...I'm his Virtual IT Director, his "hands on" network admin and pC repair guy. He has no IT staff. I'm it. I've been it for 7+ years.
The two hosts are long in the tooth now. My customer wants to upgrade. He wants better performance and security. He wants to do TEAMS including Video Conferencing, to all his staff.
I don't know what the state of "Thin Client" computing is today. I see that RDS 2022 is still a thing, and so is virtual server / virtual PC infrastructure.
Back in the day, getting full video /audio support in thin clients was a challenge. So whlie I think about updating his physical hosts to something newer (HPE Dl 380 G10), but I don't know if RDS is still a viable modern approach anymore. Moving to dedicated desktops would drastically increase his MTM management and CAPEX costs. But I don't know how to give him full video conferencing capabilities off of either an RDS environment, or a virtual PC environment.
Anyways, just wanted to ask around about how YOU might approach modernizing his environment.
Most of his staff are pickers/packers/shippers. Lots of barcoding, printing, picking and packing orders. 3PL.
Love to hear what you think. Would you go back to dedicated client (fat) / server computing? stick with virtualization only? Stick with RDS?
how can i enable multimedia video conferencing support in virtual enfironments or RDS environments? is it even workable or should we be looking at dedicated multimedia enabled endpoints?
