[wplug] Citrix

[Ted Rodgers]

I used citrix metaframe presentation server pretty extensively for
awhile, mostly on the admin side of things.  It's interesting in that
it can be run to serve out and load balance both Windows and *nix
applications to hosts clients running any OS.  Overall, it was not bad
at all, particularly for serving out from Windows servers.  Their
management tools were very nice and added a lot of features to normal
Windows servers.

The client side of things was alright, too.  Their ICA client
integrates perfectly with Windows clients and pretty well with clients
running Gnome.  Other Linux desktops are supported less well when it
comes to integration and by default gave a weird ugly panel with the
application icons on it.  With some hacking on the config it did work
well and looked nice, nearly as nice as under Gnome.  The Mac client
was pretty aweful looking out of the box, but could probably be
customized to look better as well.  The downside to hacking the
configs is that it was pretty poorly documented even though many
options appeared, although were commented, in the config files.

The major drawback with using Citrix is that from my experience they
really really push you to set it up using both a Windows domain and to
use IIS to serve it out.  It does work with Apache, too, though.  And
*nix servers can do the serving; with some tweaking any kind of backed
can do the client authentication, too. Another very nice feature is
the drag and drop capabilities between your client and the server
storage servers.  Even on *nix and Mac, any directory can be mapped to
any location you have access to in the Citrix farm.

One major pro of Citrix is that as long as you use one of their
prefered setups, their support is top notch.

My experience with Xen has been less, but it worked alright when I
used it.  Their are are other easier virtualization technologies out
there.

If you or your environment are interested in Microsoft technologies,
Citrix is not a bad route to go.  It fixes a lot of quirks people get
when using a normal Windows server in Application Server mode.  But,
there is always the fact that Microsoft owns a whole lot of the Citrix
company, so that is always a factor.