Sun Ray for home x86 PC?
 

I wonder, is it possible to connect a Sun Ray to a intel PC? Is there anything special needed? Something to be aware of? I am thinking of setting up Sun Rays to my Solaris b68 intel PC. Instead of a computer on each floor, I can have a 4 Watt Sun Ray.

Yesterday night I was wondering something similar:
what are the requirements to connect a Sun Ray to an Ultra 20 M2? Or more generally: what are the requirements to connect a Sun Ray to another machine?

A mandatory requirement is to have SRSS installed on the server and a valid license per virtual client.
You also need to have enough RAM on it to avoid pagination with multiple clients.

SRSS is the SunRay Server Software, and, yup, lots of memory on the SunRay server is important. It might also help if it is a fast dual processor server.

Basically, all the sessions for the SunRay clients run on the server. The display only is sent back to the SunRay, and the keyboard operations and mouse clicks are sent to the processes running on the server. It is sort of like running an X client (hrmm, are those a bit too old to be remembered?), but the SunRay, I believe, is a Java based client.

It is also said, by Sun, that you need a dedicated high speed network (100Mb) for the SunRay interconnect. However, I ran them on a vlan in a switched environment with only 10Mb to the desktop. You should have two network interfaces on your server. One will serve the SunRay interconnect and one will connect to the general network. The SunRays only talk to the server. The processes on the server talk to the general network. The SRSS connects the two.

Great info! Where can I find more info? Is the software free, or is there another alternatives?

I am considering quad core x86 with 4GB RAM. To this I will connect SunRays with 100MB/sec. This is better, thinks Al Gore.

Start here: http://wiki.sun-rays.org/index.php/General_Info
No, it's closed source commercial software.
There's however a free trial download (90 days).
http://www.sun.com/software/sunray/getit.jsp
I don't think so.

The interesting thing is that the "software" is free to install, but you can't actually connect without client licenses (which cost something like $125-$150 or so USD).

SunRays work pretty well though. I'm sitting at an old SunRay 170 (connected to a Sun v250) right now typing this. :-)

Ok, it is free to install, but I cannot connect without a client license? "Cannot connect" as in "Solaris asks you to type in a correct license code before proceeding" or as in "Solaris tells you that you cannot connect without having a correct license, but you are free to proceed"?

No point in a free 90 day trial if you can't use it. It may have a limit on number of SunRays, but I couldn't find any explicit statement other than the 90 days.

SRSS 4 has a lot of stuff that wasn't there when I used SRSS. It's cool that you can now run it on an x86 system. It recommends 2 or more CPUs, 95M disk for installation and 50-100M per client for swap, and 20-50M memory per client on top of other requirements. Also the server must be Solaris 10. What's interesting now is that they also list, for x86, RHEL AS 4 update 3, SuSE Enterprise 9, and Windows Terminal Services if using the Sun Ray Connector for Windows. I'm guessing that means that SRSS on Solaris 10 will connect to those and pass the desktop to the SunRay clients.

I don't know anything about a 90 day trial for the software. The location I download from just says "free" for the software...

RHEL and SEL are supported as server platforms. The server doesn't have to be Solaris 10.

Here is the home page link for SRSS on Sun's website:

http://www.sun.com/software/sunray/index.jsp

You'll see 90 day trial partway down on the left.

What page are you looking at?

Maybe the software gets locked when 90 days has passed? Anyone knows?

The SRSS software is indeed downloadable for free and there is no license enforcement or locks.

A license is required per client unless you do not care for support or patches, in which case I believe you can just use it as is.

Ok, so the software causes no problems. The hardware, can I connect any SunRay to a x86 Solaris? Maybe SunRay 150 only works with model bla bla? Which refurbished SunRay can I use?