Wyse: Effective, but proprietary

We believe that this device is poised towards value-added resellers and others that want to take the time to understand Wyse's unusual and proprietary configuration system; we've never seen anything like it before.

With the V10L terminal, you can display host sessions/VMs, but you can't copy anything onto the device's storage (there isn't any) or to the USB ports, or anywhere else save a printer port — without enabling this feature in an externally administrated control file.

The V10L box uses a standard monitor, keyboard and mouse — but the computer inside uses a proprietary operating system called WTOS for Wyse Terminal Operating System, Version 6.4. Barebones.

WTOS requires external configuration files (it saves very little in its onboard flash storage) that access an FTP server for 'INI' file configuration of the terminal's settings and access. As FTP is an insecure protocol at best, we feel that the device provides vulnerability to organizations using it, even within secure network boundaries.

While the V10 is more difficult to configure than most proprietary devices we've seen, once working, it did a great job of displaying Windows XP VMs on our VMware View 3/4 or XenDesktop configurations using RDP and ICA protocols — both atop VMware vSphere-hosted XP VMs.

Wyse also offers optional multimedia components specific to the Wyse TCX Multimedia Server (tested), TCX Bridge Sound Server (tested), TCX Multi-display options (not tested), TCX USB Virtualizer. Even with the Multimedia Server and Bridge Sound Server, we were unable to obtain satisfactory multimedia in our YouTube tests. Video was choppy and sound was intermittent and lagged the video over our test transport. It seemed to work better when we didn't use the extra Multimedia and Sound Bridge server software.