Dell has started its work with the business unit of Wyse to release new thin clients tailored to collaborate with Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 OS.
The devices will be modelled to work with the touch-based Metro user interface in Windows 8, and the new hardware will be shown at VMware’s VMworld conference in San Francisco between August 26 and 30, said Jeff McNaught, chief strategy and marketing officer of the Wyse business unit at Dell, on Tuesday.
The Wyse unit delivers a range of products consisting of thin clients in the form of laptops, monitors, and zero-client desktop boxes. Virtual desktops are served to the thin clients either via centralized or virtualized servers, and Wyse also provides desktop virtualization tools to enable remote desktops. Wyse thin clients are based on x86 and ARM processors and run on the proprietary ThinOS, Linux, and embedded Windows OSes. Wyse also offers a software stack compatible with Microsoft, VMware, and Citrix virtualized environments.
SUNDE’s Zero Client is arguably the “zero-est” zero client of all. It has no onboard processing, operating system, or intelligence whatsoever, but is simply an “I/O redirector” that works via TCP/IP. The SUNDE device is inherently much simpler than a thin client, and because there is no firmware to be updated or “hard associations” to be created between the zero client and the virtual machine that comprises a user’s virtual desktop, it makes discovery and provisioning for VDI a much easier process.