Citrix or Terminal Services

[paddya]

I'm after some thoughts please, not sure if anyone here can help.

Currently got 1 main office and 2 remote offices (soon to be 3) that VPN into our main office. I'm getting bad broadband speeds here, but for some reason only 1 office notices it, probably a personnel issue.

Recently made some changes in our main office, such as putting in an Exchange 2007 server along with a ISA 2006 server. With this I need to purchase a new server for the 3rd remote office that we are opening.

It was mentioned to us that we should go down the route of Citrix, as we would benefit from increased bandwidth and therefore better speeds on the VPN. To do this, we thought that the local server we were going to place in the new office, could be located in our main office and run Citrix. The disadvantage I see to this is that I haven't got a local server up there for their profiles, printers, WSUS, AV, file storage.

Now I guess for the file storage, I could put in a NAS box, they could get their WSUS and AV updates straight from the net, but still leaves a problem with profiles and printers. Regarding printer, I will be installing a MFD device which will go straight into the network, but how would the traffic be sent to it. I'm guessing it would need to be installed on our main server, then piped back through the VPN link, therefore wouldn't this slow the traffic down? With the profiles, I'm guessing with Exchange, there is no real need for them to have roaming profiles, the PST files will be stored on the Exchange server and not local client and their documents should be saved in the NAS box. I would then need to sort backing up the NAS box.

All these options and queries, hopefully you guys can help out with. Long and short of it is that we've been told Citrix is quicker, but it's new to us and something doesn't feel comfortable about it.

Thanks

 

[Uhtred]

You are correct, you don't need roaming profiles and outlook data will be opened from exchange. If you keep wsus and av updates off your vpn link then you'll be laughing. Citrix needs a good quality connection though, low pings and no packet loss. You should have some kind of QOS so citrix traffic is high priority. We use MPLS for our 20 sites, worth looking into as well.

Printing is a ball ache though, you need to research that bit very carefully. We are moving towards MF devices, network scanners which send to pdf etc as they work much better with citrix

 

[#Chri5#]

What applications would you be serving via the Citrix server?

If it's everything a user needs, then there could be nothing to store locally at the remote site.

PST files? Ergh!

 

[paddya]

Yep with regards the WSUS and AV, at the moment, our main server downloads everything, then syncs it to the remote servers in the evenings, I would continue doing it this way so that it doesn't interrupt. Obviously they can individually do it, using their own connection, but then I have no central control.

For the printers, we replaced most our printers with Kyocera Copier/Scanner/Printer's which are excellent, not sure on the traffic though as obviously it would be installed on our main office server and assume data sent back the VPN.

Obviously it seems as though we haven't got that good connection anyway. Application wise, it's a Accounts/Estimating/Costing package we use, that is located on our main server. At the moment users from the other offices Terminal Service into it. I would keep main office tasks local.

Just feel vunerable without having a local server at each office