Terminal server sessions w/Citrix

[rchstar]

CE, Thx for the advide with audio in citrix sessions. I need to rephrase the question though. We are attempting to run educational games in terminal server sessions to multiple workstations. We could not get audio thru-put and
was told that Citrix metaframe would be might be usefull in what we were attempting. We have sound now, but it is choppy and inconsistant with video action. We have configured it just about everyway we can but no luck. The question is " Is Citrix the right software choice for what we are trying to achieve?" and is it a matter of having the right configuration?
Thx in advance
RobH@craftek.net
W2K server
10/100 Lan network
Win95/98 Workstations

 

[CitrixEngineer]

I am advised that video over MetaFrame is "Not Supported".

Useful advice from Citrix aside, my experience has been that games generally do not run well over MetaFrame. I have managed to get *.mov and *.avi format videos working with sound, but other formats have not been as successful.

Having said that, a group of colleagues and I, one night, got 10 sessions to Quake III running in a playable state with sound. However, this was on a quad-processor machine with 4Gb RAM and a RAID controller equipped with 128Mb cache. We got about 30 fps, which, as any Quakemeister will tell you, is pretty poor.

If you have tried different audio and screen resolution configurations on a sealed network (away from any intrusive broadcasts), and not noticeably improved matters, then I would think that this game is not suited to this environment.

What is the game?

 

[rchstar]

We are attempting to run a variety of educational games for kids(reader rabbit,math blaster,grammer games etc.)At this time we are experiencing a delay of 3 to 4 seconds between video and sound.We are running W2K server on dell poweredge 4200 w/dual PII 300 128M ram, Workstations are Win95/98 with p166 and 32M ram.We have tried running with the 16 bit ica client and the 32 bit ica client with no difference.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

A major part of your problem is that you do not have enough memory.

128Mb is about right to run Windows 2000 - and very little else apart from the O/S.

You need at least 128MB + 32Mb per user (although I'd suggest 64Mb per user).

Try giving the server more RAM and see what difference that makes.

Hope this helps

 

[Pritch5000]

The amount of memory required is dictated by the software that you are using. MS Office will take 40MB plus say 16MB for the Client OS. Any other stuff will increase memory. If you are using performance intensive stuff like some educational packages (and more significantly, games), you can expect this to be pretty poor. CitrixEngineer is quite right to say you don't have enough RAM (in any case) but do you have enough processor power and thru-put? A dell PE4200 is now a prety old server and was never designed for the performance intensive OS, that is Windows2000. It just seems to me that you've got the wrong server all-together for the job.

Curiously how many clients are you supporting with this server?

Have you looked at the performance commitment of the server, even with something simple like Task Manager.

Some real performance guru's, I have read, say that even Win2K profesional needs a minimum of a PII 300 with 128MB RAM, that is just one desktop!!!

this may not be what you want to hear but I hope it helps you identify the problem.
pritch.