Citrix

Was hoping someone knows of a website that has a simple explanation of what Citrix is and what are its benefits (other than citrix's own site). Or, if anybody out there might know enough about it to explain it in short terms. All help will be appreciated. Thanks again...

I have used Citrix extensively.

Here is the short and simple:

They provide ditributed application services to users. In other words, you buy MS office and you have 5 seats available. You have 20 employees and you don't want to buy each one a license. Well with Citrix, you can have your users hit the citrix server and use the application when they need to. The theory being that not all 20 people will need MS office at the same time. They can connect to the Citrix server when they need the app.

They do this in an environment that resembles Terminal Services. They even offer encrypted connections, etc.

But one thing I can tell you that the citrix site wont and that is that performance is pretty slow.

Thanks thehorse13!

Citrix is nice. We have a citrix server here. By design it's whats called a "thin client" technology, and it allows our remote users to connect to our internal network and have full access.

It is an extreamly efficient server platform for dial-up users, because all data stays on the internal network (unless pulled by the client) and the only thing being transfered over the line is keystrokes and screen refreshes.

And for the person who made the performance statment, I dissagree, our citrix server is very fast. Someone botched your install. Citrix to perform well has allot of undocumented registry tweaks that are essential to it's performance. Consult a company certified as a citrix gold partner.

Quad,

Certainly we agree to disagree :)

However, a quality product shouldn't have to be tweaked very hard to perform well. This is a blanket statement of course but in the case of Citrix Metaframe, I personally believe that it is poo poo.

I worked directly with Citrix technicians who knew less about networking than CHUBB institute graduates.

Now, you may have used Citrix over dial-up in the clear and that may have worked well, but the minute you use their extranet component to encrypt sessions, performance grinds to a crawl.

Anytime you encrypt a stream, you will see latency. Even if using a hardware accelerator, or dedicated appliance. But overall Citrix as a whole is a solid performing layer. And we use it on NT of all things. :)

We would setup Metaframe servers (on W2K) and place them behind their ExtraNet VPN server. Then, as you probably know, there is an ExtraNet client that needs to be installed so that you can pull down VPN permissions in order to start your encrypted MetaFrame session. This is where we would get kicked in the ass. The latency was so bad that keystrokes were about 4-6 seconds delayed.
Now, Citrix insisted that the ExtraNet component was actually a third party software package that they had branded and the issue was with these guys. I never did solve the mystery because when I contacted the manufacturer that OEMed the ExtraNet VPN, they pointed me right back to the Citrix developers. Oh well, what can you do...

Turn on keystroke local echoing. That may at minimum, give the perception of faster performance to the user.