[THIN] Re: Citrix VS Terminal services, what's the difference?

From: "Evan Mann" <emann@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 13:16:57 -0400
We don't pay a programmer just to write this app, it's just something he
does for my department, and his 10 minutes of time is far cheaper then
my hours and hours of time to use other tools.  It's not a learning
issue, it's simply not cost effective to put hours of work into
something that can be done in 10 minutes, and the long term support for
the methods you suggest are far greater then doing what we do.  Citrix
is costly, but the long term costs of savings outweigh the initial costs
in the type of environment I'm operating in currently.

You didn't account for the seamless integration that the citrix web
portal and PN Agent offers.  Letting a user go to an intranet site and
clicking a link for "program a" and seeing it open right on their
desktop is worth the cost alone.  Or I can use PN Agent and it auto-logs
in and the shortcuts show up on their desktops (which is NOT pushing
shortcuts to 3500 users inside of the server, it's on their fat client
desktop).  The seamless integration is an awesome feature.  Sure, there
are other products to offer the features I want, but the extra money is
worth spending because of the ease of administration on the backend,
IMO.


-----Original Message-----
From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Jeff Malczewski
Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 12:59 PM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: Citrix VS Terminal services, what's the difference?=20

I think that you need to sit down a read a good solid book on Group
Policy
Objects..   You don't have to kill explorer.exe..  You can push
Mandatory
Profiles onto people, GPO's to hide everything on their desktop, and
then tell the session what apps to launch.  All through GPOs.

As for load balancing, yes, 2000 TS can do this with Advanced Server.
Like someone else mentioned, it's not resource based..  You just tell
each node what percentage of users to handle.

As for advantages that Citrix has over TS?  I couldn't tell you, I've
never worked with Citrix..  But I do know that for my environment (two
offices, 500 people in each, 6 servers in each), Terminal Services does
everything I want, at a MUCH cheaper price than Citrix...

As for pushing shortcuts to desktops, with VBScript, I can push a
shortcut into every copy of every profile in a site (3500 instances of
that shortcut) in about 5 minutes, and it shows up in real time.

There's ways to do most everything you need to do, it's just a matter of
whether you want to take the time to learn to do it, or you'd rather
just spend the money to have someone else write a pretty little
interface for it.

From my reading, the only thing I would see as useful is the size of the
ICA protocol vs the RDP protocol (16k vs 48k per session, respectively).
That's what presently restricting me to ~85 users per server are my
pipes...



-----Original Message-----
From: Evan Mann [mailto:emann@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2004 6:01 PM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: Citrix VS Terminal services, what's the difference?=20


I had a 1 MF XP1.0 FR2 server at my old company and here I have 4
Windows 2000 Terminal servers.  No big farm where I needed load
balancing and things like that, just basic systems.

My biggest complaint of not having a client like PN Agent or Nfuse
(called something else now, forgot the name) where I can give certain
users access to specific apps only, and force it upon them.  If I want
to force an app on a user with terminal server, I have to do it with the
environment tab in AD Users/Computers, or create an RDP using the
program line.  Most of my users need access to 2 or more apps. I DO NOT
want to publish a desktop so I need multiple RDPs.  That's anightmare to
maintain for many users, and on top of it, unless I restrict the NTFS
permission on an RDP, they can disable the program that is being
launched.  With PN Agent, I can push shortcuts right to their desktop
and make it seamless. With Nfuse, I tell them to go to a webpage, and
based on their username, they are shown the links for what apps they
need.  Set it to run seamless and the user doesn't even know they arein
another machine. =3D20

Right now, with 2000 terminal server, my programmer creates a customized
app that kills explorer.exe and shows them the select shortcuts for apps
they need.  It's much more managable, but still far from the management
Citrix offers.  Which is my other biggest missing piece, the
managability of what users can access what apps, on a per user, and more
importantly, on a group, level.

Terminal Server is not as functional as Citrix, IF you need those extra
features.  If you find you aren't using them, why pay the extra $$?

-----Original Message-----
From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of John Van Gerpen
Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2004 5:32 PM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Citrix VS Terminal services, what's the difference?=3D20

I administrate Windows 2000 network and Citrix Medaframe XP.  Looking at
CO$T$ and maintenance associated with Citrix I'm considering scrapping
Citrix and going with a Terminal services RDP environment. All my
clients are WinXP and Wyse terminals (RDP).  The only down side I know
is the load
balancing Citrix can do, and Terminal services cannot.   What do you
think
the advantages and disadvantages are between RDP & ICA?=3D20 Is Terminal
services as functional as Citrix?

Thanks in advance
 John.
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[THIN] Re: Citrix VS Terminal services, what's the difference?

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