Advice needed on Citrix being used worldwide

[Grunty]

Hi,

I just wondered if anyone has any experience with using Citrix across thousands of miles and several time zones.

We currently use it from our head office to a remote office a couple of hundred miles away (both in UK) successfully, but it may be needed in a new office in the far east.

My questions would be about long-distance reliabilty, any delays, and how Citrix handles the time differences.

Thanks in advance

 

[ascotta]

Citrix handles the time differences by estimating the client end time.

As for reliability, well it is the internet I assume you are using as a backbone, so its probably as good as anything else. You just need two good ISP's, who know what they are doing.

As for delays, it just depends what you are going to try to acieve, and probably more imprtantly, what other traffic is using those connections.

[blue] A perspective from the other side!![/blue]

Cheers
Scott

 

[lb63640]

I can only speak to the situation in terms of hundreds of miles instead of thousands, and being within the same time zone. The clients connect with basic ATT/Yahoo DSL and Charter Cable, and are located about 300 miles away from the server. We never have problems--except for when the server location loses power, or there is an internet outage at one location or the other.

We do have one user who connects via satellite. Be warned! The latency issues are bad, but doesn't prevent her from working. She gets frustrated sometimes, but is a company owner, so isn't in danger of missing productivity levels

 

[Grunty]

Thanks for the replies. The info about the time zones is useful.

Some of our users occaisionally use dial-up, slow to get ther but useable once connected.

We will use the internet, so whatever the distance it should be ok. We have had the occaisional connection from Spain, maybe 1200 miles away with no problems.

 

[fs483]

I agree with satellite it can be difficult. I have a dozen users about 4000 km away across an ocean and it works. Latency is very high due to the physical distance between the ground dish and the satellite (and back). One way to solve any issues is to disable the Reliability setting on the citrix client.

One thing that was brough it is interesting. How would you make the local time zone appear in the remote citrix session ? My users have never complained about the 5-6 hour difference.

 

[patrickrouse]

When planning access for any remote user, look at the connection latency. If it's greater than a few hundred milliseconds your end users will complain, as the response to their clicks is not immediate. As the latency increases toward or over 1 second, the connections can get unusable.


Patrick Rouse
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server

http://www.sessioncomputing.com