Questions on Win2k3 Terminal Servers

P

puck

Gawd
Joined
Apr 13, 2004
Messages
607
At work we are getting ready to move to a much bigger building and in the process are doing a complete computer upgrade.

Currently we are planning on having capacity for ~250 users with in a year and currently have ~70 users.

My thoughts are to setup 2 or 3 servers to act as terminal servers and use either win2k3 or citrix and thin clients.

Questions:

Is Citrix worth the extra price?
The only plus I see in it is the Load Balancing ability.

What is the usual price for a Citrix license?
I'm still waiting for a quote from the reseller or Citrix themselves.

I know WinXP Pro comes with a User Terminal License but does CE or XPe?

Any recommendations on thin clients?
Currently I'm looking into Neoware.
 
With the current price of PCs and the abilities of AD + GPOs I would suggest against thin clients completely. What are the needs for the end users?
 
Simple MS Office stuff (Outlook, Excel, Word), loan processing, internet browsing.

Nothing intensive.

I just see no need for them to have a whole computer when 95% of the time it's idle or close to it.
 
I know we spent several hundred thousand upgrading our network from novell 4.11 to citrix metaframe on win2k.

Citrix provides nice management features, nice frontend for apps (webpage), and had decent performance over slow WAN links.
Worth the price? Not sure about that one, since it is going to be pricy.
But once it is in place, it is nice.

The only problem I have with thin clients, is that they are about the same price as a low end dell pc.
We pay $250 w/o monitor for a thin box.
But on the plus side, they don't have moving parts, are completely silent, have remote control abilities (vnc), and if they so break, it's a 2 minute swap out and all your apps are there.
 
Citrix gives you better printer management, which is a very big deal. 95% of the time I'm working on a Citrix/Terminal Server problem it's printing. It is multi-platform on the client, which may not matter. It works better over slower connections. The farm/load balancing/failover option is a very big deal if your company depends on the service. If one server goes down you don't want the whole company down.
 
you can do load balancing/failover with TS though it may not be as good. i had a small 2- server citrix farm here when i got this job. it made me want to kill myself. i killed one of the servers and citrix worked much better. then i replaced citrix with a single win2k3 TS and it's even better still.

i know a lot of people love citrix and think it's the bees knees. and it offers a lot of additional functionality. but i hated it every single day i used it, and it costs a fortune. i think our little farm cost $20K to implement and the yearly subscription was $2000. my TS deployment only cost < $2000 in total.
 
NetJunkie said:
Citrix gives you better printer management, which is a very big deal. 95% of the time I'm working on a Citrix/Terminal Server problem it's printing. It is multi-platform on the client, which may not matter. It works better over slower connections. The farm/load balancing/failover option is a very big deal if your company depends on the service. If one server goes down you don't want the whole company down.
Click to expand...

you hit the nail on the head./ printer is by far your biggest callenge in a TS invironment. Citrix is a lot btter with printing. Citrix also is uses a lot less bandwidth. with 70 users with a max of 2050 i would be looking at 3 servers. Citrix is more money but its better than MS TS. you can help offset the cost by using old pc and dumb terminals or buying thin client terminals like wyse terminals. they cost a lot less than a PC. you don't have to do much to them and the user can't break much on them either. check out thinstation.net i was looking at them about a year ago but couldn't get the local lpt printers mapped but maybe they have a better version out now. use a pc and it doesn't need an os. just boot from cd and 32 mb ram.
 
I thought about using our existing PCs as terminals but the Boss wants to get rid of everything and start fresh.
 
I run our Citrix Farm here and it's been somewhat stable. The printing support supposedly got a fafillion-gajillion times better with Metaframe XP (I'm STILL fighting local printer mapping here). We're running 1.8 Here but I'm only holding off until I get our new boxes in. As for cost, it isn't cheap to run Citrix. Never has been.

Daddy Fat: any good links to doing 2k3 TS? Wondering if it's worth teh headache since I already have our farm up and running. We have 200 employees but I never see more than 15-20 users on a server since we only publich specialty apps on our Metaframes.
 
yeah, i have to annotate the doc i used and then i'll publish it. i'll post back here with a link for ya, but it might be about a week before i get it posted. in the meantime MS has a whitepaper and some best practices docs up. mine will be the condensed step by step how to built from those.
 
The only thing I'm worried about with using Win2k3 TS by it self is the load balancing. We only have network printers here and those that don't would have their own full desktop machine.

I'm going to need to setup a test bench and play with Win2k3 load balancing I think.
 
puck said:
I know WinXP Pro comes with a User Terminal License but does CE or XPe?
Click to expand...

I use Terminal Server 2000 at work, and we did not go to 2k3 because this is actually not true any more.

An XP Pro license does not give a Terminal Server 2k3 User licence.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtobuy/licensing/ts2003.mspx

"In the past, the TS CAL requirement was waived if the device accessing the terminal server was running the same or later version of the equivalent desktop operating system. For example, a device running Windows 2000 Professional could access a Windows 2000 terminal server without needing an associated TS CAL. With the release of Windows Server 2003, this is no longer the case."

==>Lazn
 
typhoon43 said:
Daddy Fat: any good links to doing 2k3 TS? Wondering if it's worth teh headache since I already have our farm up and running. We have 200 employees but I never see more than 15-20 users on a server since we only publich specialty apps on our Metaframes.
Click to expand...
the article is linked above. as for your situation, the thing you would miss the most is publishing apps. you can't just have apps show up in someone's start bar and they lunch them from metaframe. they need to log onto the TS desktop and open the app there. my user's haven't complained much because TS has been so much more reliable and they get had all the apps on their desktops anyway (don't ask, it was the most idiotic waste of money ever).

the main negative is that it does seem like people notice the extra bandwidth required by TS. i've scaled back the color depth and stuff and that helps, but i doubt anyone would ever find it usable on dial-up.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top