I have some questions about Citrix

[daishi5]

I work for a Hospital that is looking into installing citrix for our remote sites, and some of our less demanding users. With the decision making process is coming a lot of rhetoric about how great it is, how little bandwidth it needs, how resilient it is, and all the cost savings it will bring.

I am wondering if anyone has real experience with it, and could give me some more info. I am wondering what the real life bandwidth constraints are, such as they claim they can run 2-3 clients with a dial up connection with reasonably good response times not including file transfers. Is that realistic? We plan on using 4-7 per site what type of bandwidth would we need for these? Does anyone know of any hidden costs, or hidden concerns that should be planned for that could surprise us?

Also I would just like to know how pleased people are with it, and if they thought it was really worth it.

Thank you.
(I am also new if this is the wrong place, could you please point me in the direction of the correct place for my questions.)

 

[arsbanned]

My experience with it is very limited, but negative. One of my client's uses it on her home PC to remote into her workplace. It's forever crashing the system. PITA. Again, I wouldn't take that as the be all end all representation of Citrix.
Edit: Machine is Dell 2300, Windows XP Home, 256 MB RAM, etc etc.

 

[timswim78]

I used it at my previous employer. We had 10 users using it on a DSL line that also served as our email/Internet needs of 30 employees. I never experienced any slowdowns; however, my home connection was also broadband.

I did try calling into it with dial-up a few times. It was bearable for getting some information, checking emails, and a few spreadsheets. However, at dialup speed, I would not consider it to be fast enough for an employee to work remotely all day/

 

[Nothinman]

We use Citrix for all of our user's remote access and the problems are minimal. There used to be issues with printing (i.e. the Windows print system sucks and can cause the system to BSOD) but I believe with Citrix XP those were pretty much taken care of. There are clients for every OS imaginable. The bandwidth it requires is really small, it's usable over dialup. You can choose to just publich certain applications instead of giving your users full desktops. appsec is a must, it allows you to specify which app are allowed to be run by non-admins, this way only corporate approved applications can run.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

With dialup it MAY be usable for 1 user, but not a chance that I would use more than that or try to do any sort of file transfer.

I manage a network where we use all thin clients and citrix and while it doesnt use a huge amount of bandwidth, dialup just wont cut hte mustard when multiple clients are using the same connection.

 

[Nothinman]

With dialup it MAY be usable for 1 user, but not a chance that I would use more than that or try to do any sort of file transfer.

Dialup from the user's side, there's no way you would try to run the server itself off of dialup.

 

[daishi5]

With dialup it MAY be usable for 1 user, but not a chance that I would use more than that or try to do any sort of file transfer.

I manage a network where we use all thin clients and citrix and while it doesnt use a huge amount of bandwidth, dialup just wont cut hte mustard when multiple clients are using the same connection.

Current plans are to use a DSL line of some form, I am not sure if they have ironed out the upload and download rates we will be using, or even if we will go with async or sync. But from the responses it sounds like we will do fine with that.

Does citrix have any "hidden" costs, or things we need to plan in advance for. Our current network is rock solid, and local deployment would be on a small scale. However I understand that the more clients we deploy the more RoI we will see. Also are response delays very noticeable?

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Use microsoft Remote desktop over the same connection and you pretty much have the citrix "feel"

If you think its laggy there, then you really dont want to put the money into citrix because they are nearly identical when it comes to look n' feel

 

[Zolty]

Citrix rules, so long as they are only going to basic applications (MS office, limited internet ect.)

as far as bandwith you are going to want at least 3-4KBytes per user, preferably more.

 

[OffTopic1]

4-5 years ago I was part of a team that test out Citrix & MS Terminal Services for our local hospital, and found that both run about the same even those both have different suggestive memory & hardware requirement (MS licenses Citrix for NT4 which is older/slower version of ICA with no frame redraw optimization, but latter incorporate it into Win2K "RDP5" with 16bit colour bug fix and some redraw optimization).

Windows RDP is quite slick, but it only support Windows 3.11 and up.
Citrix ICA support all DOS/Windows/Linux/Unix/Mac/Java, and it require server extension.

The different:
Windows RDP come bundle with Win2k Servers & up (Win2k Pro & up clients don't require licences, and Win9.x & below clients require licences).
Citrix require extra licensing fees on top of OS licensing.

To make Mac/Linux/Unix/Amiga/OS2/Java/"cygwin/win32" client compatible with RDP use opensource ?rdesktop? (run RDP in native mode and just about as slick as MS/Citrix).

 

[Sunner]

We used it where I work, but that was some time ago, when Win2K Server was brand new.
Was a nice system, like Nothinman said, we had some problems with printing, not the one Nothinman specified, but some other minor problems.

Wasn't for us however, our users just run too many weird applications, which turned it into a complete PITA to administer.