Some Citrix recommendations

[wikken]

We have been using W2K Terminal Server for about 5 years. I have 3 terminal servers configured for load balancing. Most of my users (60) have Neoware thin clients to connect to one of the three terminal servers depending on load. A handful of users have PC's and connect to the terminal servers using RDC in Windows XP. I have about 5 users that connect to terminal server from home with firewall VPN. My boss wants to look at adding Citrix to our environment for better connectivity for more people from home, the published applications etc... I have some questions:

I think that the neowares connect using RDP, can this be used with Citrix or do I need to buy new equipment?

I currently have a TS licensing server, do I just add the citrix to this server for licensing

How does licensing work for Citrix.

We were thinking of going with blade servers instead of the rack mount individual servers and want to look into server virtualization... is this something that can be used with Citrix

Thanks for any suggestions

 

[enigma99]

wikken,
Here we go....
Most all thin-clients will have both RDP and ICA clients built into it. If not, you should be able to get some firmware upgrade that will add that ICA client to your neoware clients. So you should be ok with that (check by going into the connection manager and adding new connection and see what protocols you have).

You will need additional Citrix licenses for your environment. You will need just a server license (you have a couple of options A or E) and then you will need your user licenses. The user licenses are based on a concurrent connection method. So if you only have 10 users connecting at one time...you should only need 10 licenses.

Blades are actually the best for a Citrix environment. I've used IBM's Bladecenter HS20/40's and they are wonderful. I've heard great things about HP's BL series as well. It really all comes down to what you like (some have better imaging, deploying or managment utilites).

The only concern I would have is building these on a WIN2K environment. I would go ahead and jump to WIN2K3 but you will have to pay for ALL new TSCAL's...which is kind of a bummer.

I hope that helps out a little.

 

[wikken]

Thanks enigma99... I believe that this would go along with a software upgrade to 2003. We are actually looking at replacing all of our hardware. These 3 terminal servers are 5 years old. I could look at getting 3 blade servers from HP to replace them...not sure where to start with that...the load balancing, is that looked after by the OS or with Citrix? Do I need a seperate blade server for Citrix to run on?

I currently load some of the applications that TS clients use on the terminal server hard drives with an icon on "All users desktop"... some are loaded onto a shared clustered file storage and the workstation component is loaded onto the terminal server with the icon in the same place... Does Citrix care where the applications are loaded?


Thanks for comments.

 

[enigma99]

wikken,
Citrix is simply an application that runs on top of Terminal Server. The Citrix applications enhances and provides more features to the Terminal Services component.

Citrix will be loaded on top of your TS servers and managed via the Access Suite for Citrix. Here you will be able to publish out "Seamless Desktops", "Published applications" (ie..MS Outlook, Word, Excel...or w/e)and content (Web Page, document...etc...etc).

I would load all of my OS and applications on the local disk drives of those servers. Remeber that you want to have all of your Citrix servers the same so you can load-balance the applications across your Citrix servers.
That way when your users click on the "Desktop" app they will see the same environment across all servers.

Citrix will take care of the load-balancing for you *(You have to have Citrix MPS A or E for load-balancing). You will simply have to provide the information on which servers you want to add to the load-balanced application.

You might want to check out Citrix's web site

http://www.citrix.com

and look at the Admin pdf for Citrix MPS 4.0. This is a good starting point for you.

Hope that helps.