Citrix vs. Remote Desktop Services - which is "better"?

[MrEgo]

Are there advantages of one over the other? I inherited a Citrix environment at my current job, but I was wondering if anyone had any experience with Remote Desktop Services (formerly Terminal Services)?

 

[kamikazekyle]

I can't say too much since my experience with Citrix is quite limited. Like you, I inherited it, though I use that term loosely. It's mostly that I happened to use it to get Windows services on an old Solaris 8 box, so I became the defacto Citrix guy.

Anyway. I would say it would depend on what your purposes are. If you're virtualizing applications only on an '03 server, you'll want to stick with Citrix. For plain ol' remote desktop on Windows/OSX, there's not too much need for Citrix aside from a few value added things as both have native RDP clients. Citrix does have some nice tools and configuration capabilties, but again, they're more along a value-add than a requirement that doesn't really start getting a return on investment unless you see some heavy use.

Here, we now only use Citrix services for remote desktops on Soalris 10 thinclients. The servers are pretty old, so we're on a push to get them consolidated to one (or two if we can convince on redundancy/clustering) servers running terminal services only. Solaris has an RDP client that works fine, so there's no need for Citrix clients to initiate the remote sessions.

Note I don't have any experience with the newer Citrix stuff, nor Citrix on 2008 servers. I'm also assuming remote desktop services or OS-native RDP clients aren't prohibited via group policy or some such like it is here. That's our major hiccup -- we don't control the domain, so plain RDP logins are prohibited. They pretty much REQUIRE us to use Citrix even though we don't have a need for it.

Anywho. Hopefully someone more experienced can come along with more info. I'm curious myself since I haven't done anything with the new Citrix products.

 

[Cstefan]

Xenapp6 on 2008r2 is pretty damn awesome. I haven't played with the new new new RemoteFX and I don't know how it would compare/compete with Xenapp6.

 

[daishi5]

What are you using citrix for, and what would you be thinking of using RDS for? If you are just giving them a desktop on the server with all the apps installed, there is no benefit to citrix. Here, we provide remote physician access to several types of patient records, roaming access to several different medical apps, and we have several remote sites around the country which we provide all of their applications through citrix. A lot of our stuff in citrix could not be matched by RDS. The important question to which is "better" is "better for what?"

 

[MrEgo]

It appears that our users are logging into a Citrix connection depending on what application they are using. There is a financial application published for the accounting crew, a security camera application installed for the security crew, and there is a Microsoft Office 2007 desktop published for anyone to use.

People often connect to our external website and connect to Citrix through there, so they're able to get mapped drives from home.

Can RDS do these things just as well?

I'm still unclear as to the benefit that Citrix provides over RDS.