New to Citrix

[bigpapapump]

I am new to Citrix and would like to get some recommendations on server specs, i.e. RAM, Disk space, Processing power.

It will be a Win2k server that just hosts Citrix with a possibility of maybe 80 clients hitting it. I have a full T1 for data lined up.

Any thoughts?

 

[ahalecitrix]

Here is what I would recommened.

Remember that Citrix licensing is for the entire MetaFrame farm so whether you purchase MetaFrame Xps, Xpa or XPe with 10 connections or 1000 connections you can install Citrix on one server or 100 servers. For this reason it often makes sense to spend your hardware budget on multiple less powerful servers as opposed to one huge server.

You could go with one expensive gigantic server (Quad Xeon, 3GB of RAM etc...), but I would advise you to consider spreading the user load across multiple servers. 2 would be fine, but 3 would be ideal in my opinion if you forsee growth in the near future.

With two servers I think you could get away with servers with Dual P4's, and 1-2GB of RAM. I've supported quite a few sites that have servers with that configuration and have published a full desktop with Microsoft Office to the users. They seem to run just fine with a user load of about 30 users per server.

For hard drive space you can usually get away with the minimum available nowadays. I don't recommend storing any data on the Citrix servers. You just need enough room for the installed applications and user profiles. I'm not sure that you can even purchase a server with less than a 20GB hard drive and with 40 users per server and properly configured roaming profiles and home directories you should have plenty of space.

When recommending server farm configs I usually assume these things for server specs (and honestly I just shoot this from the hip):

Dual P4's minimum
1GB of RAM minimum (I prefer 2GB but 1GB is honestly sufficient for most apps).
Hardware SCSI RAID 1 Mirror (and as I mentioned above a 20GB hard drive is usually more than sufficient.

Then I just divide the number of intended Citrix users by 30 and that's how many servers I recommend. (i.e. company has 90 Citrix users. 90 divded by 3 I'd recommend 3 servers.

I know that wasn't a very technical answer, but that's my 2 cents from experience.

ahale@socal.rr.com

 

[bigpapapump]

Excellent answer, exactly what I was looking for.
Thanks.

 

[ahalecitrix]

No problem, if I can be of further help, let me know.