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We've been in pilot phase with IGEL for over a year now (long story), but did evaluate Wyse and HP long ago, along with Stratodesk/nComputing. Our current standard for this pilot is the updated IGEL UD2.

UD2 being the smaller of the 3. Are you using that for Citrix connectivity? Does it work well with teams / zoom?

Our current pilot is using Imprivata appliance mode to allow users to tap their badge to get into their Citrix Desktop (W10/1912). There's no workflow for videoconferencing, as these have no mics or speakers, but they use Teams' other features in the desktop.

Full disclosure - I work for IGEL. However, in my last job, where I was the IT manager for 12 years, we ran IGEL on ~1000 devices to replace HP thins with HP Device Manager. This was to access a Citrix environment offloading MS Teams. The Teams portion worked well with decent hardware. Definitely requires more than bargain basement HW. In a job previous to that, I ran Dell / Wyse with Rapport (so, MUCH long ago 😄 ); Anyways, all that being said, taking my work hat off, I really like IGEL and the management capability it has. Outside of that, being able to convert devices was nice as well. The cadence of updates is MUCH faster than the other vendors we worked with, as well.

So that's who you left for... we have a plant with IGEL now. 😄

LOL. Better believe it!

We had a bad experience with Wyse here long ago, so management would never approve it. That said, we did evaluate the management system and it is still pure trash, IMO. HP was somehow even worse.

HPDM was SO BAD, my techs would routinely threaten to leave the company over it. One day, they "accidentally" wiped it...still not sure if that was accidental or not. LOL.

IGEL was, by a wide margin, the most customizable.

Wyse management is giving us a hard time right now. All our users are remote, so good management of the device is a key thing i’m looking for.

IGEL ICG is where it's at then. Remote management of the endpoints.

The IGEL Cloud Gateway (ICG) was a fantastic tool for us when the COVID lockdown's started. Allowed us to fully manage remote devices, including updates, settings, shadowing, etc.

We don't use it for the general population yet, but I've had it setup since March of 2020, and it has worked really well. Even pushing firmware updates from our DMZ FTP box to the endpoints is smooth.

shadowing would be awesome.

Secure VNC also works remotely.

Just being able to walk an end user though an issue while seeing their TC screen would be a game changer for us. Right now it’s snapshots from cellphones….

The only downside is the requirement of the additional license for ICG.

We’ve had remote users for a few years. We ship pre-configured devices to them, which is a manual process that in itself takes a lot of effort for the team.

If you ship pre-configured stuff to them, I think this custom app would resolve that. I'd have to look closer, though.

Management is the Wyse Cloud. Which has been ok. Not stellar, but better than the previous option which was Ncomputing via a netscaler tunnel into our DC.

We preconfigured for our users, and once they received the device they just hooked it up, turned it on, and started working. We also had to remotely configure ICG some times, and it's pretty straight-forward. Easy enough to walk a staff member through. Our staff were also using Cisco JVDI remotely via Citrix for our Call Centers. This worked very well for us.

Recently Wyse stopped talking to over 400 of our systems. Support on getting that resolved has been a 3 week trip to nowhere. Frustratedly looking around for future purchase recommendations is never a good thing - but here i am. Being a ControlUP customer i also like that iGEL is a supported platform for RemoteDX.

They also hate it when people write iGEL... lol

Yeah, the Java console is....Java. Putting my work hat back on - we are working on a WebUMS console, and it's still early stages. https://kb.igel.com/endpointmgmt-6.05/en/ums-console-ums-web-app-31599371.html

Yeah, the web console is getting better. We're running 6.07.100.

Ummm...you shouldn't have to. You can either publish, or provide just the tar file...one sec, let me find the KB.

Stratodesk shop here and I love it!!! Interface is native h5 on a linux appliance, remote management works as it should, completely hands off. I ship direct form CDW to the users house, give them the url and it's done. I came from HPDM which I still have nightmares about

I was waiting for you, Nick, haha

Two Nick's can't be wrong.

Here is the KB: https://kb.igel.com/endpointmgmt-6.07/en/ums-console-via-java-web-start-43106550.html

Gonna have to play with that a little, because it doesn't seem to want to open for me.

Late to the party, but here’s another happy IGEL customer. The secret sauce definitely comes with their software and management stack. The hardware is nice, but nothing too special and maybe be a bit expensive. We‘re using a broad mix of converted 3rd party hardware and original IGEL TC hardware to access Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. In my opinion IGEL has the most mature and flexible solution in the market. As stated alteady the Java based tech needs and will to go away and there is the lack of a SaaS model with a vloud hosted UMS. ICG to manage remote devices is great, unfortunately not (yet) offered as a OOB virtual appliance and you have to spin up and maintain your own Linux box.

Tried it from my admin box, which has it installed (also has UMS), and a test VM that I downloaded Java on.

@David Prows may be able to chime in as a customer since I think he finally learned to spell IGEL

@Webster Webster thanks for the ping. @Paul Brown We have used both Stratodesk and IGEL and IGEL is by far easier to use and much more flexible. We switched to IGEL from HP. For the Java console, we publish it out as a Citrix App so no one actually has it installed on their local devices. As far as the web console goes, they are making great strides on it and I actually have a meeting with them in about 5 minutes to give feedback on future changes they are going to show me. From a help desk standpoint, our level 1 staff use the Web Interface for 95% of everything they need to do, which is minimal. A majority of the system is automated for deploying new profiles (policies) to devices based on attributes of the device when it connects to UMS. I will come back and give some additional info in a bit when I am done with my call with them. I can't give info on what they are sharing with me as it is NDA, but I will share more information on our experience with IGEL and recommendations I have for you.

Yeah, Java web start is simply not working for me, in QA or Prod. Weird.

@Paul Brown, I wrote an article on creating and configuring an IGEL management server. In case that may help you. https://carlwebster.com/23-building-websters-lab-v2-create-an-igel-management-server/

@Paul Brown I would recommend joining the IGEL Community and getting some trial licenses to use. The Community has a getting started guide that goes through setting up the UMS and getting started from scratch. @Webster Webster's guide is good also. The community is a great resource for getting started. Well, really, great resource even for experts. They will also send you a UDPocket you can use to test with too. If you aren't familiar with the UDPocket, it is a USB device you can boot to on a computer and use the computer as a thin client without affecting the OS installed on the local hard drive. When done, just shutdown, remove the UDP and the computer will be exactly as it was before booting to the UDP.

Great move @Tim Riegler

I remember @Tobias Kreidl had a lot of Wyse at one point and the firmware support costs seemed steeper than many options...

Igel or Stratodesk are both good options. As to specific hardware, I dealt with Dell thin clients for many, many years and they have become IMO pretty bad. Units just a few years old suddenly were no longer supported with new firmware, making some Citrix functionality incompatible, for example. They broke often and performed sub par. Customer support was disappointing.

There’s also the RX420 from NComputing with ARM based IGEL OS available. Supports Citrix only for now but might evolve over time.

Devolve if we're talking VMware... since we're in a Cirtrix-dominated Slack 😉

My opinion is for the pricing of the RX420, unless you have a need for the size of the pi, I would look at an IGEL UD2 or another hardware vendor where the pricing is relatively the same, but has better resources.

The pi options are great if you plan to do support via jiffy bag for branches or plan on incinerating/blowing up your thin clients at some point (e.g. if you are leaving iraq type scenarios)

IGEL is the only vendor providing fast updates and basically free support with their slack community.

One advantage Stratodesk has over IGEL is the integration with Imprivata. Right now, IGEL cannot do Imprivata outside of appliance mode, which is a huge issue for us, personally. They're developing a new solution with Imprivata now, but it sounds like it'll still be limited. Stratodesk can utilize the Imprivata agent natively, outside of appliance mode, making it much more versatile.

Late to the conversation and massive thread but in short going to IGEL you won’t regret it, grab some trial licenses or UD Pocket and download the Getting Started guide and you won’t look back. https://www.igelcommunity.com/igel-getting-started-guide Any problems or ‘how do I do this with IGEL?’ questions jump into the IGEL Community on Slack and they’ll get answered

So far happy with wyse they update the Citrix client pretty regular. The Dell hardware is far better then the igel and igel lacks a cloud solution.

We use Praim devices here the customer support is good, they're being dumped for Dell however from what I can tell the machines are solid running ThinOX , regular firmware updates and easy to report bugs when they occur, their THINman management console is simple and easy to use for deployments

We evaluated Dell, Wyse and Stratodesk. For us, we had a requirement that we wanted to reprovision our fleet of Dell hardware (desktops/laptops), as well as buy thin clients off the shelf with an OS. For us, IGEL was the only one that offered that. Plus, as others have said, their IGEL community Slack is really good. There's always someone there to help. It ticked all the boxes for us.

Working my way though this thread. Some comments based on the excellent feedback so far: • 95% of our ThinClient userbase is remote home user. A Cloud type management plane is a must. • These are call center workers. So high(ish) turnover. Oftern without returning the equipment. • They are also revenue generating users, so high need to keep everything working. • Jiffy bag troubleshooting is, frankly, our current method. Want to move away from that, purely from a logistical standpoint as we have ended up needing a shipping dept just for these users. • The users access a Win10 Citrix MCS desktop via Citrix cloud gateway. Wyse v9 with its package based model supports that, IGEL has to also. • We have a call with IGEL this week.

Knowing your requirements going in is more than half the battle. We struggled with that, and with other business units outside IT making demands. Ultimately, it was our ability to remotely support users via IGEL that allowed our staff to work remotely during COVID. We could not have done that without hiring additional staff. Side note, and still without my work hat on, have you looked at the IGEL UD Pockets? Before I worked at IGEL we investigated them for remote workers, except we also still needed to provide headsets and monitors, so for us, it was easier to just deploy an entire WFH "package." However, it might be a viable alternative - lets you use your staff's personal devices securely, with all the benefits of IGEL's remote management. One thing we found that we also needed for our remote users outside of the thin client was a way to validate / monitor their network performance. SO MANY TIMES they would have problems, and it was on their side - either router (hurray for crappy ISP all-in-one devices!) or they were too far away for good signal, or <insert problem here>. We had ControlUp, and a view with session details, including latency, where our helpdesk could see that our satellite users had 4000+ ms of latency. In our WFH policy, which all staff had to sign before working from home, we specified a maximum latency that we would support (in our case, 300 ms, which was JUST at the edge of what Cisco could handle for our call center agents). If staff were outside that, it allowed our helpdesk to inform them politely that they needed to fix their side of the network - either reboot the router / device, or contact their ISP, and the ball was out of our hands. All that to say - have an idea of what your operating parameters are, document them, and then have a tool that you can use to monitor them.

@Paul Brown, @Tim Riegler It's interesting you bring that use case up. We're doing something very similar. seeing if we can use Citrix for remote call center agents. We'd be using Jabber/JVDI. I definitely will revisit the UD pockets though. I've kind of thought of them as a gimmick in the past, but now you mention it, they could absolutely fill some gaps. Interesting. We also have ControlUp, with EdgeDX, with we've so far successfully been able to install the Linux Agent on IGEL, so we can see stats about the thin client. All in all, we're pleased with what we've seen so far.

That's fantastic @Rob Sheppard! We did not have the EdgeDX, we just watched the Citrix Session latency (one published desktop for all users made that VERY easy). Once we finally got our Cisco infrastructure working correctly, Jabber / JVDI with IGEL worked REALLY well for us.

That's encouraging to hear @Tim Riegler. I feel a lot better about the choice we made! If you have any tips and tricks, or pitfalls to look out for, I'll gladly take them. No worries if that's a huge hassle though. Just trying to head off any issues before we see them.

Biggest thing for us was sizing our infrastructure on the Cisco side correctly. We had to completely rebuild our VERY old Cisco infra, and that cost us quite a bit. Once it was done, though, the Jabber / JVDI worked nearly flawlessly. Only couple items that I recall being problematic were staff latency (either at ISP, or within their house via WiFi) and making sure to match up the JVDI client to the server correctly. Oh, and making sure that your headsets work, and that your staff know how to use them....ours had to switch headset styles when they moved home, and that was....not fun.

Yeah. I've brought up on more than one occasion, managing the headsets via Plantronics management software. Making sure they're on the same firmware, configured the same etc, without success. We seem to go through a ton of them. Not sure if it's that there are genuine issues, or folks are using it as an excuse for getting out of taking calls. Maybe a little of both...? Thanks for the JVDI tip. I've made sure to keep all the pieces at the same level (as much as is allowed), but next month our Security Team are taking over patching, and have committed to updating Jabber. It will be interesting, for sure.