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Anyone have any experience using Advance2000's services? I've been looking around online, haven't found much in the way of reviews. Actually, I haven't found much other than the company itself talking about itself.
My company is looking into using them (or someone / something similar) and replacing all our workstations with thin clients, and I'm interested in what sort of impact that will have on my own work. They've got a demo server set up that we can currently access via VMWare View, and I've spent a few hours playing around with that. I've formed some opinions, but I'm also looking to see what other people's experiences / views have been, to see if there's something that I'm missing that will push my opinion further to one side or the other.
Anyone?
Rusty
i don't even know they are allowed to do that
this is from the EULA: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Installation-Licensing/Autodesk-EULA-and-non-Citrix-Virtualization/td-...
DarrenP
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Yep.
I don't really understand the back-office setup they've got running, so it very well may be Citrix-based. I can't really imagine that these guys are straying from the path though - they've been making plenty of noise online about their services, although most of what I see is Revit.
Rusty
Will, your name rings a bell. I'm pretty sure we actually spoke on the phone at some point.
Any road, I no longer work for the company I was with at that time, so I can speak a lot more freely now. Please understand that everything I'm writing here is based on my own experience and observation. I am not accusing anyone of anything, and I am not saying that others may not have better experiences ... but ... these are my experiences, observations and opinions.
1. Your hardware. At the time, we had several demo machines available to us. If I remember correctly there were 3 virtual machines and 2 dedicated workstations. The virtual machines were utterly useless with Inventor. They might be okay for light word processing, but at a raw capability level they were not capable of doing any kind of heavy lifting with Inventor. The dedicated workstations were in fact more powerful than the workstation I had on my desk at the time, and - disregarding other issues which I'll address shortly - they would have been fine.
2. Cost. The virtual machines might have made economic sense, if they had been usable with Inventor. The high-end dedicated workstations, however ... made zero financial sense. As it stood at the time, we were buying high end workstations and a software package for ourselves, and selling them off after the warrantee expired. If we had gone with your service, we would have had to buy you high end workstations, at whatever your markup was, plus a software package, PLUS we'd have had to make massive upgrades to our IT infrastructure, and then on top of that we'd STILL need to buy workstations to have on our desks to communicate with your servers. So, instead of buying ONE computer per person, we'd have been effectively buying TWO, plus the other costs. Not a particularly attractive proposal. (Our CFO thought he could eliminate the IT department. Eventually someone must have reminded him that we'd still have to have just as much IT to handle the networks and the computers we'd still have had to buy.)
3. Terrible user experience. As I noted above, the dedicated workstations were powerful enough for our needs ... but the remote performance just wasn't there, and lag made your service actively unpleasant to use. I personally tested your service from work, home, multiple Starbucks locations, multiple hotels, and multiple airports. In no circumstance was it possible for me to make use of your service in a way that would provide me with a satisfying user experience. The dumb terminal was even worse than using it via VMWare - after I set it up at home and used it for a few minutes, my wife got sick of listening to me grumble, and told me that I had to be exaggerating. I had her come over and try to check her email on Yahoo. By the time that she made it to the login screen for Yahoo, she not only agreed that it was terrible, but told me to start polishing my resume.
There were four of us assigned to test your service. One of us was never able to get a successful connection. One of us said he'd be willing to use it while he looked for a different job that didn't require him to work that way, and the other two of us said we'd rather be unemployed than work that way.
In the best-case scenario - my home internet, my personal i7 workstation at home, connecting to your most powerful dedicated workstation through VMWare - I was able to achieve a user experience that was just about on par with running Inventor 2013 on my 8-year-old (now long since departed) computer with 4 GB of RAM and a 512 MB video card. The raw performance was fine, but there was a ridiculous amount of lag on every action. Just typing in Notepad, I could type 15 to 20 words ahead of what was visible on the screen. In Inventor, every zoom or rotation of the part caused tremendous screen tearing and lag, and it was impossible to get delicate movements to actually happen the way you wanted them to work. With your highest-end workstation, it was like trying to drive a Ferarri with a 2-second lag on every control input. Painful. Agonizing.
4. Sales. We were dealing with some third-party guy that was trying to sell us your service. He, on a personal level, burned so many bridges with the people testing your service at that company that, even if your service had been good, I think we would have rather left it alone than put a penny in that guy's pocket. I wish I still had access to my stash of CYA emails - I'd love to share his stuff with you.
Now, since your coworker Mark brought up the licensing earlier in the thread:
"Hello! Since this topic shifted to licensing, I thought I would offer some perspective on the issue. Autodesk has
been visibly offering their "Citrix-Ready" solution for several years now, yet little mention is made regarding
other VM possibilities, such as VMware used in private cloud computing. For us, license compliance is a high
priority, so we asked Autodesk for clarification regarding VMware and our specific implementation, and received
judgment that we are compliant."
If I were in the market for your service, I would want to see this "judgement" in writing, because the plain terms of the software EULA specifically prohibit using any "non-supported" virtualization methods, and VMWare is not on the list of supported methods.
There were also other concerns I had about the technical implementation - sub-letting, installation of software on computers not under direct control of license holder, specific prohibitions against using "software as a service," etc.
Again, I'm not accusing you of violating these EULA provisions, but they were concerns I raised with my company above and beyond the performance issues that I had.
Rusty
Will.Leger wrote:
Wow! Where to begin? You must type about 300 wpm!
75 to 100, depending on the keyboard.
I've been with the company almost 4 years and brought in over 20 firms. I've never heard such terrible performance stories from anyone ever...except, I do recall one firm in So. Cal. that a reseller of ours was working with, and he told me there was something wrong with the performance. I won't give his name out here in this forum, but his initials are DS, if that helps.
Not Southern California, but yes, essentially. And yes, those are his initials. As mentioned before, I wish I still had access to my email account from that other company. That guy didn't make ANY friends whatsoever. His ultimate sales pitch boiled down to that we had to simply decide what level of degraded performance we were willing to settle for and give him lots of money
We are currently using a vGPU solution with Citrix, and the performance is real time. Revit users are very pleased with performance, and even Lumion renders and performs extremely well. Our standard offering is a virtual desktop with 4-cores and 16 GB of RAM. I am constantly giving out demo accounts, providing price quotes and proposals that address challenges and offer solutions.
Yes infrastructure is important - after all, you're connecting to OUR data center through YOUR technology. We like to see current technology in place (Layer 2 or Layer 3 switches, managed is better), and some form of high-speed internet. We require about 1-2 M of bandwidth per concurrent user, and at least 5-10 M per site to start with. I work with a lot of firms that have 10, 20, 50, 100 M and they all do quite well.
We were being sold this technology as a replacement not only for our in-office stuff, but also for our road warriors. I can't carry a layer 3 switch with me to Starbucks.
As to needing 2 desktops, yes that's also true. You use your computer (MAC or PC) to connect to and remote control your cloud desktops. The beauty here is that you don't need a high-end PC to connect with. That said, if you just went out and bought one, then it's overkill. However, if your current desktop is aging and it's time for a new one, you just keep using it because all the horsepower is on the cloud desktop. Our solution is very attractive to firms with 3-5 year old computers and servers, and they can now avoid the cost of replacing everything. I personally sell a lot of thin clients (terminals) to access cloud desktops, and these can cost as little as $350 and last 6 years. If everything you run is on a cloud desktop, then you don't even need a local computer anymore, and the thin client works perfectly!!! I'm sitting in Charlotte, NC right now, working on an HP T610 thin client, logged into a cloud desktop in our Buffalo, NY data center, and as I type I don't watch the keyboard and the letters are appearing as I hit the keys. My cloud desktop is logged into the autodesk web site, and I'm in the forum replying to you...from a cloud desktop.
I'm not sure how it's cheaper for me to buy a good workstation for you and a cheap workstation for me than it is to simply by a good workstation for me and NOT have to buy a cheap one for me as well. That part was never really clear.
Like I said, that might make some sense if a shared VM would work with Inventor, but the ones you set up for the demo were simply not powerful enough.
I truly have absolutely NO IDEA how you were at home trying to test our stuff and unable to connect to yahoo.com to test your wife's email.
This was using your thin client. At first your tech guys said that it had the wrong firmware, but that wasn't the problem. The firmware was the right version, and we were following the setup instructions you provided. At least two of us tested it from our homes, and we both agreed that the performance was significantly worse than using the same connection via VMWare. I don't recall what the other guy's connection was, but I get 70-75 MBPS at my house.
As to the licensing - we have everything in writing, and rarely get asked to see proof. I recently had to, and actually got Autodesk to put it in writing to my client (an owner operator running projects in our cloud and giving out cloud seats to 4 collaborating partner firms. we setup VPN tunnels to each partner firm to access their license server, and each firm is using their own network Revit Licenses. We are in total legal compliance with the EULA, and not violating anything. We require network licenses for all our customers to run ADSK apps in the cloud. Period.
Roger that. No further questions on that point.
I still can't believe the bad experience you had, and you said you tested both inside and outside the office. It could only be poor bandwidth, and I mean really poor! My internet recently went down for a day (I work from home), and I turned my Samsung Galaxy S4 into a hot spot and conneced wirelessly (my thin client is WiFi), and continued working just fine.
Inside the office there's no mystery. That company was paranoid about IT, and every single workstation in the company had to VPN to headquarters and then get out to the backbone from there. I had something like a 330 ping to your server from work. We knew that would be a problem (hence why I mentioned the need to redo our IT infrastructure), and that's why we were doing most of our testing from home or from outside the office.
At home I have the fastest internet that Comcast will sell to non-commercial customers. I have enough bandwidth to simultaneously stream HD video to my PS3, PS4, Roku, XB360 and my wife's computer, while downloading massive files, and still have enough left over for both me and my son to get a few quick lag-free frags online. Bandwidth ain't an issue at my house.
It must have left a pretty bad taste in your mouth to make you want to say all those negative comments about our services in this forum. You left me no choice but to log back in and reply to your post. I'm available by phone (704-200-9745) if you ever want to discuss things with me personally. If our services worked the way you described, and the finances were not in line (they are), then even if they were affordable, no one would use them due to performance reasons. As it is, I have an 8-user engineering firm running their entire business in our data center (Fitzpatrick Engineering), a 30-person architectural firm doing the same (ANF Architects), and many large firms with multiple locations running their entire businesses out of our data center (FKP Associates). I'm attaching case studies of each of these.
It did leave a pretty terrible taste, but more for DS.
As far as "negative comments," I'm just detailing my own personal experiences. I minimized the editorializing and the hyperbole. You have your case studies, and I have my own experience. I would have never brought this up - I'd completely forgotten about this thread, and hadn't even thought about your company or DS in years - if thread necromancy hadn't turned the dead into a living, breathing sales pitch.
HDR is in our data center right now testing our current technology and they love it! They are woring with 4-5 other sizable firms on an IPD project, and everyone tested our demo accounts and said ABSOLUTELY...bring it on! I personally spoke with one of the other firms, in Boston, and he could not stop talking about how well our stuff is working and he is considering our services for his company - this was the IT director.
I would encourage you to test our desktops again, consider that thin clients fit in very well (dual screens!), and our services are very affordable - especially with long-term commitments.
Reach out to me anytime, and thanks for sharing your past experiences.
No need for further testing. I'm with a different company now, and we are very firmly rooted in having computers right here at our desks. We like our IT folks, and they like us. We're not trying to fire them. (Although, I do have to say that I'd like to have the IT guy's office ... it's closer to both my shop and the coffee maker, and the server room would make a great engineering storage closet ... )
Rusty
Just for fun I took a look back through my external hard drive and found a video that we'd recorded of one of our tests. This is using the dedicated workstation on your end. It's not shown in the video, but my notes tell me that from this hotel we had a 22ms ping to your server, and up/down bandwidth was 8-9 MBPS.
The model is substantially similar, but not identical to, one of the parts that I was working on at the time. I also have a video shot using my workstation at the office to run the (actual, not "similar") part, but that one is confidential due to design features that are not included on this one.
Things to pay attention to on this video are, particularly, the screen tearing and lag on the rotations, and also the lag in the pre-highlighting. As the mouse cursor moves across the part, notice the little circle dragging behind it - that's the pre-highlight. See how long it takes for that to catch up to where the mouse actually is?
Sorry about the portrait vs landscape issue - I didn't take the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGzrDuFN1Ko&feature=youtu.be
Rusty
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