Thin clients or blade pcs?

I would steer you away from thin clients or blade pc's from a cost perspective.  From a management perspective they're awesome, and they move the managmenet away from the desktop computer itself.  If your a one man IT shop this could save you a boatload of time.  Clearcube has some great options with being able to reallocate machines upon some types of failure i understand.  I was told by a clearcube rep the TCO is about 1.25 of a traiditional desktop pc.  This of course also depends on what type of machines you've been buying or will buy.  Licensing still will cost you remember, so if you go to something like cloearcube, each blade itself needs a host OS, and i think the max they reccomend is 4 users to a blade.  So your licensing cost will go up there, you'll need 5 os's for four users and the host OS should be Windows Server not XP.  Citrix is good and i've used it, although the latency irritates some users in slow network enviornments.  Make sure you have great wiring (cat 5e Prefferably Cat 6 though), switches (definitley want managed switches), take the time to setup some QOS, and really test line quality before you go into any thin client, or clearcube, or citrix solutions.  What kind of environment are you working in, is this an office, shop, retail store, warehouse?  Just curious as clearcube's solution is very well suited to dirty and dusty enviornments.

Thanks for the quick response. This is an office environment but a few systems will be deployed in our warehouse at a later date. I'm currently runing HP ProCurve manage switches with Cat 5e cabling. We are looking purchasing Dell Optiplex 330s if we do not go with another solution. I can see the beneift of Clearcube in some situations but from the sound of it we might be better off with something else.  My main task is to make manging clients easier. What are your thoughts on using a terminal server and thin client devices?

The only thing with thin clients is to make sure you have a backup server. Otherwise, as soon as the server goes down, your users can't do anything... And your lost user productivity will cost the company quite a bit.

ok. not the *only* thing. But something to think about from experience.

I'm thinking about going with dual Dell 2950s with quad cores and 8GB of ram each and the users will be using a WYSE thin client device. The users will need to access the following:

Sage Pro ERP
Office 2k3 - Word,Excel, and Outlook
Internet Explorer 7
iSynergy - web based document imaging and workflow
Fax Client

Do you think this would be an ok setup? What is the best method to load balance the servers?

Thanks for all the valuable input! What is your view on using blade servers for terminal services?

Blade servers are for sure a good alternative. The main thing is still cost. You cannot beat the 1U pizza boxes. Depending on your particular requirements (physical space, power requirements, etc) Blades may be the best option. And of course it all depends how big this environment will grow.
As an example right now I am working on a 50,000 concurrent users TS environment. At the end we will have over 1,000 servers. Could not be done without Blades.
Does it mean I would use Blades everywhere? Nope.
For a 2-10 TS environment I am almost certain I would stick to the 1U pizza boxes.
Love Pizza man. ;-)

Claudio Rodrigues
Microsoft MVP
Windows Server - Terminal Services

Thanks for the input. Now I'm thinking 2 Dell 1950s with W2K3 Standard, dual quads, 4GB ram, and 2X load balancer sounds like a much better solution. I love pizza too!!