Thin client usage & Perspective

Ignition
1

We're looking to adopt Ignition Perspective in the coming months/years and I have some questions about thin client usage:

Currently, we use an assortment of other HMI packages that client sessions are hosted on Windows RDS servers, managed by Rockwell's ThinManager. The majority of the first batch we'd be migrating (~30 total) are all ThinManager "ready" meaning they PXE boot to grab all of their configuration and launch directly into their RDS session on a RDS server.

The initial plan was to continue to use this setup, but instead of launching whatever HMI software each client runs on the RDS server, they launch a browser or Perspective Workstation session instead.

I've seen references elsewhere that touch on this being a bad idea for Perspective clients, but I couldn't seem to find any elaboration why. Is that the case?

That being said -- if that is the case, are there any suggestions as to what we should be looking at to replace our current client/server infrastructure with? We're looking at the idea of using a container host to serve individual containers per client -- which ThinManager supports, or switching to some low end boxes and using LTSP to serve individual stripped down unix images.

2

You loose all possibility of uniquely identifying specific clients by security zone, since they will all have the RDS server's IP address.

My recommendation would be to drop RDS entirely, PXE boot directly to a custom Linux install that runs Vision or Workstation in full screen in lieu of a desktop.

(I also recommend not switching to Perspective for on-machine HMIs. There are many Vision vs. Perspective topics here that explain why.)