Wyse Xenith – 5 Minutes to Xen
In our interview with the “Wyse guys,” they talked about the Xenith “zero client” terminal. To clarify, “zero client” doesn’t mean that there’s no local operating system in the device. It means that you – or better yet, your end user – can literally take one out of the box, plug it in, turn it on, and have it up and running with absolutely no need to do anything to configure it. Wyse says you can have it out of the box and running in five minutes. It took us about three…and we weren’t particularly hurrying.
The one thing you do have to do is to configure a DHCP option that will provide a pointer to your config.xml file. When you turn the Xenith on, it will query your DHCP server, and along with the basic stuff like the IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, and DNS settings, the DHCP server will, through the option you configure, provide the Xenith with the URL of your Citrix Web Interface server and the path to the config.xml file. The Xenith boots so fast that by the time your monitor wakes up and syncs to the video signal, you’re looking at a login prompt.
In this video, Steve Parlee of ManageOps and Dave Jolley of Wyse walk you through the process of configuring the necessary DHCP option, and then demonstrate how easy it is to take a new Xenith out of the box and be up and running with a virtual desktop.
I have a q I’d like to shoot past you. Somebody mentioned to us earlier today that the xen.ini file can be configured to point at 2 xendesktops simultaneously. So far I’m not able to confirm this through in the Admin Guide or else there. Can you let us know whether or not this is possible. Basically we want to access two separate xendesktops from two separate domains. I’m more interested in using the xen.ini wnos.ini rather than the Citrix Web interface management console to meet PCI compliance and not wanting to create a two-way trust.