Alternatives to Citrix Remote Computing?

Dysfnctnl85 asks: "The company I work for relies heavily on remote computing through a Citrix MetaFrame server. The reliance on this stems from the structure of our accounting software and the fact that we have 2 remote sites that need to access this data all day, everyday. We are investigating alternatives to the Citrix system we currently operate. How do companies of similar structures deal with this type of problem? Is it feasible (or practical) to use Windows Terminal Services to achieve everything Citrix is capable of doing? This includes, but is not limited to, the ability to print from the Citrix session to a user's printer, the ability to access network drives from the Citrix session, access the user's local drives through the session, and the ability to use published apps. The main concern with this type of setup is the ability to print. What alternatives are there to Citrix?"

Comments

Lots of stuff

[Daath]

Lots of stuff, some might not have what you are looking for... But hey, sift through these, and see if there is anything of interest :-)

Genuit's ThinWorx
Tarantella
Provision Networks
HOB
Prospero
Win4Lin
Konect
GraphOn's GO-Global

HTH :)

Re:Lots of stuff

[rafelbev]

There is also a product by 2X Software called Application Server which handles the Published Applications side of things as well as the Load Balancing of Terminal Servers.

However they are still working on integrating the two, this should be added in the near future. The products target directly Citrix customer's base and are slowly implementing almost all if not totally all Citrix features and more at 1/10th of the cost.

MSTS

[TheTrueELf]

Seeing as I use MS Terminal Services to do everything you mentioned, I'd say you could fairly easily kiss Citrix (and it's relatively large licensing fees) goodbye. I've migrated 99% of my company to Thin Clients RDPing to MSTS2003 servers, and could not be happier. Four branches nationwide, and (excepting servers, of course) less than 5 non-thin-client systems, 2 of which are mine. It is salient that MS and Citrix have cross-licensing and other business-partnership-type agreements, which I believe include code sharing. MetaFrame is built on top of TS.

-ELf

Terminal Server

[sid crimson]

We use Terminal Server 2003 and have had no difficulties. Server 2003 made a very nice improvement compared to 2000 since the color depth is now greater -- it's really as good as having a local desktop so long as the connection is fast and reliable.

Local printing from a Terminal connection is handled nicely, and most printers are supported via printer driver redirection... for example you will map the user's HP Photosmart xxxx printer to the Windows Driver for the "HP 950c" printer.

This package makes printer redirection easier: http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/f/2/9f237 742-e057-4e00-a0d5-62de2ebf9fbd/TSPDRW_Package.exe /

My understanding is Citrix reigns supreme WRT USB and availability. You simply cannot sync your USB Palm pilot via Remote Desktop. And clustering for Terminal Services is limited relative to Citrix.

As for other options... you might check out Linux Terminal Server Project. Without know the specific software packages you use Windows might be your only real option at the moment.

-sid

WTS is good enough

[potHead42]

I work in a company which does mainly Application Server Providing, and we switched about 2 years ago from Citrix MetaFrame (1.8) to Windows 2003.

Printing works well enough, you just have to install all the necessary drivers on the server and make sure the clients use the same drivers (though universal printing engines like ThinPrint and others will work too).

Local drives work like a charm (although only since 2003), you can even copy files with Ctrl+C and then paste it in your local explorer with Ctrl+V (I don't know if the newest Citrix also supports this). Network drives work as expected.

We don't use published applications, and as far as I know Windows doesn't support this. You *can* specify an application to run in the client, but I never used it.

Our customers all connect over the internet, and the performance is pretty much the same as with Citrix. We did some tests with Presentation Server 4.0, and it performs a little better with images because it has a better caching mechanism, but the difference wasn't enough to warrant the (much) bigger licensing costs.

I also tested the NX server from NoMachine, which supports proxying RDP sessions. The site claimed speedups from 2-10 times, although in my experience it was between 1 to 2 times, and because printer and drive redirection needed additional setup, we didn't continue with this. But for X11 sessions NX is currently the best thing (IMHO better than UNIX Citrix).

So, if you only need to provide Windows applications, WTS is a good enough replacement for Citrix. There's also an official client for OS X and an Open Source client for UNIX (which supports RDP 5.1 as well as printer and drive redirection).

Re: Um... no

[Anonymous Coward]

RDP stems FROM Citrix and the ICA protocol. Citrix was suckered into sharing technology with Microsoft so they could get direct access to the underlying API's a few years back. Citrix was smart in that they didn't share the ICA protocol with MS. MS then developed RDP as their thin protocol. Problem with that is that RDP has a 25k footprint where ICA can cruze just fine on 14k or even less. I guess if you have fewer users and don't care about bandwidth and server costs, then MS Terminal Services are for you... /rolls eyes....

For your Total Cost of ownership... Citrix is the way to go... I can't tell you how nice it is to publish an Application and not the entire desktop. That saves you from dealing with users who delete things or generally like to tinker. Add automatic printer creation and it's a no brainer.

MS did what they always do... they stole the technology and branded it as their own. Remeber in the beginning of Citrix (on NT 3.51 and Winframe 1.6), you didn't need MS terminal services at all... in fact it didn't exist!!!

More Info on the Topic at Hand

[Dysfnctnl85]

I apologize for not mentioning more about the subject, but I kinda didn't expect it to get posted in the first place.

To address the accounting software...there is no way we will be changing, so that is not a viable solution at all.

As far as investigating alternatives, we are currently running 3 Citrix MetaFrame servers. Right now, they are barely holding us user-wise, so we're replacing the existing hardware with more servers and adequate hardware. In the process, we will be moving away from Windows 2000 for a number of reasons.

So, do we continue to run Citrix and purchase the licenses for additional users as well as a version upgrade, or do we attempt to put a Windows Server 2003 solution into place utilizing Remote Desktop? Or what else?

Our current Citrix setup is not adequate, and not simply because of hardware, but printing is a total nightmare. There are so many levels involved with printing a report from our Solomon accounting software, it adds complexity to the very act of printing, so much that Citrix routinely breaks. Whoever is running helpdesk on a given day fields a significant number of Citrix calls, and generally speaking it is not the user's fault. It is extremely frustrating to say the least.

Hence this investigation. So I hope I shed some more light on the situation and please keep the suggestions coming.

We rely heavily on Microsoft Exchange, so keep that in mind when suggesting other OS-based solutions. I'm instituting a few BSD solutions for other tasks, but making the switch completely is very far down the road.