Alternatives to Citrix Remote Computing?

Dysfnctnl85 asks: "The company I work for relies heavily on remote computing through a Citrix MetaFrame server. The reliance on this stems from the structure of our accounting software and the fact that we have 2 remote sites that need to access this data all day, everyday. We are investigating alternatives to the Citrix system we currently operate. How do companies of similar structures deal with this type of problem? Is it feasible (or practical) to use Windows Terminal Services to achieve everything Citrix is capable of doing? This includes, but is not limited to, the ability to print from the Citrix session to a user's printer, the ability to access network drives from the Citrix session, access the user's local drives through the session, and the ability to use published apps. The main concern with this type of setup is the ability to print. What alternatives are there to Citrix?"

Lots of stuff

Lots of stuff, some might not have what you are looking for... But hey, sift through these, and see if there is anything of interest :-)

Genuit's ThinWorx [thinworx.com]
Tarantella [tarantella.com]
Provision Networks [provisionnetworks.com]
HOB [hobsoft.com]
Prospero [propero.net]
Win4Lin [win4lin.com]
Konect [desktopsites.com]
GraphOn's GO-Global [graphon.com]

HTH :)

MSTS

Seeing as I use MS Terminal Services to do everything you mentioned, I'd say you could fairly easily kiss Citrix (and it's relatively large licensing fees) goodbye. I've migrated 99% of my company to Thin Clients RDPing to MSTS2003 servers, and could not be happier. Four branches nationwide, and (excepting servers, of course) less than 5 non-thin-client systems, 2 of which are mine. It is salient that MS and Citrix have cross-licensing and other business-partnership-type agreements, which I believe include code sharing. MetaFrame is built on top of TS.

-ELf

Re: Um... no

RDP stems FROM Citrix and the ICA protocol. Citrix was suckered into sharing technology with Microsoft so they could get direct access to the underlying API's a few years back. Citrix was smart in that they didn't share the ICA protocol with MS. MS then developed RDP as their thin protocol. Problem with that is that RDP has a 25k footprint where ICA can cruze just fine on 14k or even less. I guess if you have fewer users and don't care about bandwidth and server costs, then MS Terminal Services are for you... /rolls eyes....

For your Total Cost of ownership... Citrix is the way to go... I can't tell you how nice it is to publish an Application and not the entire desktop. That saves you from dealing with users who delete things or generally like to tinker. Add automatic printer creation and it's a no brainer.

MS did what they always do... they stole the technology and branded it as their own. Remeber in the beginning of Citrix (on NT 3.51 and Winframe 1.6), you didn't need MS terminal services at all... in fact it didn't exist!!!

MS RDP

Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol, also known as Terminal Services, is basically a Microsoft licensed version of Citrix ICA. Microsoft basically built RDP on top of ICA. IIRC, Citrix sued Microsoft for the feature, which is why Windows XP Pro is only supposed to allow one user logged on at any time. Anyway, Terminal Services should work for you needs, since it supports all of the noted features.

-b0lt

It's all about the printing....and multi-platform.

You use Citrix for a couple of reasons. The biggest is printing. Citrix has a pretty solid print system that can handle about any printer. You don't have to worry about specific drivers in most cases as you can use the Universal Print Driver (UPD). This also applies to other platforms. So, I can jump on my Citrix farms from my MacBook and still print without ever doing anything unique. You can also attach to Citrix from almost anything.

Citrix also allows more in depth clustering and load balancing than Terminal Server. The down side is that Citrix is very expensive. You have to license the Terminal Server clients and then add citrix on top of it. Is it worth it to you? That's up to you. It is to us but we offer published applications to outside customers and I have no way of knowing what type of printer(s) they have.

Oh yeah, Citrix also allows seamless applications, which Terminal Server can't do. This lets you just publish the app and not a complete desktop.

ProPalms TSE

ProPalms TSE server is definitely a viable alternative to Citrix. I have been using it for about three years and even though the product has changed owners a few times - NewMoon to Tarantella who got bought by Sun who sold the product to ProPalms - the product has been performing great all along, with every feature you listed.

It functions using a client that extends Microsoft's RDP protocol, allowing for seamless publishing of apps from multiple load balanced app servers. The backend servers compromise various roles and support load balancing and a gateway server in addition to the app server functionality.

Terminal Services / Remote Desktop

Windows Terminal Services (now known as Remote Desktop) will let you map your local printer AND drives to the remote machine, so you can copy files & print from the remote system to the local system.

The downside is mainly in licensing, you'll need to purchase a CAL from MS for each user you want to "remote connect" (Not sure how you had citrix licensed). I'd also reccomend locking down access, either through a roubst firewall system or preferably a VPN.

Citrix features

Terminal Services doesn't have published applications like Citrix does, so if you have multiple applications running on the server you'll have to figure out a way to handle that. Load balancing and server management are also easier in Citrix. You'll also lose the "seamless window" thing. You can set up a session to automatically run an application at login, but it'll always appear as though you're remoted into a separate Windows desktop. I don't think there are any other options out there for you.. You can either pay the extra $$$ for the features that Citrix gives you, or run it on Terminal Services.

Windows terminal server can do everything you need

Based on what you listed, Windows Terminal Server can do everything you need. Citrix is just a more robust option with better administrative tools.

But your administrators should already know this since you have to have Windows Terminal Server in order to have Citirx MetaFrame.

Terminal Server

We use Terminal Server 2003 and have had no difficulties. Server 2003 made a very nice improvement compared to 2000 since the color depth is now greater -- it's really as good as having a local desktop so long as the connection is fast and reliable.

Local printing from a Terminal connection is handled nicely, and most printers are supported via printer driver redirection... for example you will map the user's HP Photosmart xxxx printer to the Windows Driver for the "HP 950c" printer.

This package makes printer redirection easier: http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/f/2/9f237 742-e057-4e00-a0d5-62de2ebf9fbd/TSPDRW_Package.exe / [microsoft.com]

My understanding is Citrix reigns supreme WRT USB and availability. You simply cannot sync your USB Palm pilot via Remote Desktop. And clustering for Terminal Services is limited relative to Citrix.

As for other options... you might check out Linux Terminal Server Project. Without know the specific software packages you use Windows might be your only real option at the moment.

-sid

WTS is good enough

I work in a company which does mainly Application Server Providing, and we switched about 2 years ago from Citrix MetaFrame (1.8) to Windows 2003.

Printing works well enough, you just have to install all the necessary drivers on the server and make sure the clients use the same drivers (though universal printing engines like ThinPrint and others will work too).

Local drives work like a charm (although only since 2003), you can even copy files with Ctrl+C and then paste it in your local explorer with Ctrl+V (I don't know if the newest Citrix also supports this). Network drives work as expected.

We don't use published applications, and as far as I know Windows doesn't support this. You *can* specify an application to run in the client, but I never used it.

Our customers all connect over the internet, and the performance is pretty much the same as with Citrix. We did some tests with Presentation Server 4.0, and it performs a little better with images because it has a better caching mechanism, but the difference wasn't enough to warrant the (much) bigger licensing costs.

I also tested the NX server from NoMachine [nomachine.com], which supports proxying RDP sessions. The site claimed speedups from 2-10 times, although in my experience it was between 1 to 2 times, and because printer and drive redirection needed additional setup, we didn't continue with this. But for X11 sessions NX is currently the best thing (IMHO better than UNIX Citrix).

So, if you only need to provide Windows applications, WTS is a good enough replacement for Citrix. There's also an official client for OS X and an Open Source client [rdesktop.org] for UNIX (which supports RDP 5.1 as well as printer and drive redirection).

Remote Access

Have a look at NoMachine www.nomachine.com. Its a linux based remote acces client/server, that allows access to windows terminal servers over ssh. It even has a java based web applet, witch allows access to applications from a web browser. Also have a look at Netilla SSL VPN.

SunRay

SunRay terminals consume less real-world bandwidth on average than Citrix-based devices. The servers currently need to be either Sun Solaris or PC Linux, but there's talk of Windows support later this year.

http://www.sun.com/sunray/sunray2/ [sun.com]

Pretty slick stuff and Sun's been doing it for about 5 years or so.

It's an Application Problem

We had a fairly extensive Citrix farm at my last job. There were several reasons for an application to be made available on Citrix:

1. The application required WinNT 4 and would not run on Win2k or WinXP.
2. The application conflicted with other, more critical applications that were required to exist on the same network.
3. Liscensing. Some applications were cheaper to run from a Citrix server.
4. Access to the application was required off-site, and Citrix works over the web.
5. Configuration of the application was so difficult and fragile that it was easier to admin the Citrix server rather than the clients. This was typically web applications that required you to set your IE security settings to "rape me".

The one thing I noticed again and again: the applications that we wanted most onm Citrix were those that did not do the job we wanted them to do. They were old, poorly coded, intended for different environments, or simply did not do what we required them to do. It was common knowledge that analysts would go out and buy software and then hand it to use and tell use to make it work, even when it was clear to us that the software was never designed to do what we wanted it to even before we put the CD in the tray.

This accounting software you have seems exactly like the same kind of situation. You're being asked to wedge an application into a role it was neither designed nor intended to perform. Consequently, you might wish to consider looking at a different accounting app instead of a different remote app server.

protocol-level acceleration

Riverbed [riverbed.com] makes an appliance that may be suitable.

Basically, it's an appliance that sits between your WAN connection and the rest of your network. It understands most protocols that send bulk data over the network, and does transparent caching such that the clients on your network don't notice anything (except improved speed), and the server on the other end still thinks it's sending the data.

I saw a demo at a CUUG [cuug.ab.ca] meeting, it was quite impressive.

Terminal Services

I used terminal services a bit on XP pro before I switched to Linux. Multi-user was disabled, so I don't know if that would cause any problems...

I don't remember if you could easily access local drives, but, unless you have some special requirements, you probably don't want users storing their data locally, but instead on a central server.

As for printing, the user could choose to allow their local printer to be connected to the server within their session; it worked pretty well.

Of course, seeing as I am a Linux fanboy, I would reccommend that you set up a central X client farm and run servers on the local computers (And a few clients, for programs that want to access local stuff) and set all clients to use a CUPS server running on the system they connect to for their printing needs...

Software...other than Citrix or Remote Desktop

Other Software Options at a fraction of a cost:

WinConnect Server XP enables a Windows® Small Business Server 2003 or Windows® XP computer (Host PC) to allow up to 21 remote desktop sessions. It allows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) 4.0, 5.0 5.1 and 5.2-enabled Thin Client devices (such as Terminals, Internet/Information Appliances, Tablet PCs and PDAs) to connect to a Host PC to run Windows® applications simultaneously and independently. Price: WinConnect Server XP can be purchased for US $299.95 for a three user license.

Actual User Comment (taken from Slashdot):

Another remote solution (Score:3, Informative)
by pyrrhonist (701154) Alter Relationship on Friday June 03, @09:17PM (#12719869)

If you're unwilling to purchase a Windows 2003 Server and a Microsoft Terminal Services license set, but still would like to run the troublesome application remotely, here is another solution.

All you need is a Windows XP Professional machine with your software on it, and then you can run WinConnect Server XP [thinsoftinc.com]. It is inexpensive, uses regular Windows RDP, includes a fairly decent admin tool, and you can try it out for free. ThinSoft also makes a Linux client, but you can use rdesktop [rdesktop.org]. The bad news is that it only allows 21 clients concurrently.

No, I don't work for them, but I have used their software quite a bit. Their site leads you to believe that they only sell licenses in groups of three, but in fact, they are more than willing to sell you individual licenses. All in all, their system works rather well.

Usurper_ii

Fix problems printing from Citrix & Remote Des

The deal with printing from Citirx and Remote desktop is that you must have the same pritner drivers installed on the server that the client is trying to use. Some printers work and some don't. For instance, unless they have some update I don't know about, MS Remote Desktop will not print to a printer working from a TCP/IP port. Also, some cheap USB printers have drivers that won't install on the server's OS, so there goes the requirement to have the driver on the server.

While there are some solutions that cost a fortune, this program, ePrintAnywhere, solved our problems and did it at a fair price:

http://www.blackice.com/ePrintAnywhere.htm [blackice.com]

It fixed every printer I couldn't get going with Remote Desktop, including TCP/IP port printers and cheap USB printers. Only one person has reported a problem -- and unfortunately, it is at a remote office, so I don't know if it is user error or a legit problem yet.

And the standard disclaimer: I do not make any money off of this product. It solved a problem, worked well, and was fairly priced compared to similar products that cost a fortune!

Usurper_ii

Citrix Runs on TS

Citrix pretty much runs on top of Terminal Services nowadays. So yes, all the stuff you mentioned is possible with TS. The fancy bells and whistles are not possible yet tho (IE: Application sharing instead of desktop sharing, Failover/Clustering of apps, etc). At our office, we run Citrix for stuff hosted for external clients, but run TS for internal stuff (primarily for failover). It works well as long as you accespt the shortcommings a pure TS environment. We'd all kill for Citrix all over, but it's just not cost effective right now. I think I heard something at one time about the next version of TS having some time of App level publishing built it, but I can't truly recall.

Nomachine NX

You've just described Nomachine NX.

http://www.nomachine.com/ [nomachine.com]

Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services

I've used Win 2k3 TS to print to local printers & access shared and local drives. You cannot use published apps in Microsoft's TS. The remote user gets an entire desktop/profile.

sun secure global desktop (tarantella)

About a year ago Sun bought [infoworld.com] Tarantella [tarantella.com] which provides remote desktop software. I've set up a testing install of Tarantella with MS Windows Server 2003, Solaris 10 and Red Hat. You need at least one server for each offered OS and Global Desktop handles the connecting and much of the glue (of course, MS makes it more difficult than necessary, but ...).

This product of Sun's is definitely an enterprise-level competitor (and really hits the sweet spot when used with their thin-client products).

...why switch if Citrix is getting the job done?

Forgive the obvious question, but why switch? You haven't given any reason for your desire to move away from Citrix. (No... I'm not a Citrix rep, but I am a satisfied customer.) Citrix's licensing doesn't require renewal. If you have a good system in place, why abandon it? Having said that, Microsoft's remote desktop in Server 2003 (the framework which Citrix rides on top of) has made great strides towards the functionality that Citrix's Metaframe/Presentation Server provide. MS and Citrix are tight business partners. All of those listed capabilities are easily achieved in a pure-MS option... although it's easier to configure if you're using Citrix. (IMHO.) If you're talking about a handful of users logging in from remote site, Microsoft RDP is fine. If you need a farm of several server hosts, with dozens or hundreds of users coming and going, and the associated challenges of load balancing, categories of published apps, etc., Citrix makes all of this easier. It's worth pointing out that passthru printing to a local machine when logged in remotely is WAY easier in Citrix that just using MS Terminal Services. The Citrix Universal Print Driver ("UDP") is not 100% foolproof (tip: it's the PCL5 driver for HP Color Laserjet 4500), but it works 95% of the time for 95% of printers. My last job had over 100 users logging in from a) home and b) other offices branches, and I only had to load a small handful of drivers for screwball home computers from Brother, samsung, canon, whatever... there is no standardization at home and that's what kills, and makes the UDP shine. Like I said, it's my estimation that 95% of printers work 95% of the time with the UDP. If everyone logging in to your farm has an HP Laserjet locally, then you won't have any problem with a non-Citrix solution. Otherwise, you'll be glad to have the UDP. Another nice feature in Citrix that MS doesn't offer - virtual IP. Big frustration of Terminal Services (in general) is that all users logged in to a pacticular server share that server's IP address. When you have older software that expects each user to have an different IP address (for machine-to-machine messaging, for instance), 20 users all having the same IP addy throws a wrench in the works. The newsest Citrix Presentation Server (4.0?) handles this situation. I can't speak about the other TS software mentioned in other people's responses, but MS doesn't handle this at all. I'd suggest setting up an RDP server (like a citrix server w/o the actual citrix software), since you already have all the licensing and software that you require: MS Server CALs, and MS Terminal Server CAL's. Play, test, evaluate. Good luck!

Why?

We are investigating alternatives to the Citrix system we currently operate.

You said this, but didn't state why you're searching for alternatives. Is it because it's too expensive, because you need more features, or because you think there's a better alternative out there?

I think about the only argument you can really have is that it's expensive. There really are no other alternatives out there with more features (other than perhaps value-add things on top of Citrix Presentation Server, the new name for MetaFrame) or more stability/usefulness.

Some shops are able to make-do with the lower costing alternatives, but they have to live with far fewer features (e.g. only allow full desktops, don't do printing very well, have no way to load balance, have no way to isolate bad apps from one another, etc). If your needs for it are lighter then you can try piloting a Terminal Services-only solution which is (necessarily) less expensive than a Citrix one.

It's hard, though, for people to offer something better than Citrix. They've spent their entire lifetime focusing on the whole remoting applications gig. TS and RDP was built on top of code licensed from Citrix, so even MS takes a backseat.

More Info on the Topic at Hand

I apologize for not mentioning more about the subject, but I kinda didn't expect it to get posted in the first place.

To address the accounting software...there is no way we will be changing, so that is not a viable solution at all.

As far as investigating alternatives, we are currently running 3 Citrix MetaFrame servers. Right now, they are barely holding us user-wise, so we're replacing the existing hardware with more servers and adequate hardware. In the process, we will be moving away from Windows 2000 for a number of reasons.

So, do we continue to run Citrix and purchase the licenses for additional users as well as a version upgrade, or do we attempt to put a Windows Server 2003 solution into place utilizing Remote Desktop? Or what else?

Our current Citrix setup is not adequate, and not simply because of hardware, but printing is a total nightmare. There are so many levels involved with printing a report from our Solomon accounting software, it adds complexity to the very act of printing, so much that Citrix routinely breaks. Whoever is running helpdesk on a given day fields a significant number of Citrix calls, and generally speaking it is not the user's fault. It is extremely frustrating to say the least.

Hence this investigation. So I hope I shed some more light on the situation and please keep the suggestions coming.

We rely heavily on Microsoft Exchange, so keep that in mind when suggesting other OS-based solutions. I'm instituting a few BSD solutions for other tasks, but making the switch completely is very far down the road.

Look at a Caymas Box

We just dropped an appliance from Caymas Systems [caymas.com] in place at our firm and it has changed the way we think about remote access to applications. Not all applications really require access to a full remote desktop, especially when many systems have web based front-ends. The money we were considering spending on a Citrix server has been used to provide a solution that is more flexible for our environment, fairly easy to set up, and plays well with users of non-windows operating systems. One plus is that for web based apps, home users become responsible for their own printers. No struggling to get them working with our windows terminal server. I'm not really sure about your exact needs, but this is worth looking at.

Citrix versus others

Lots of people have mentioned that Windows Terminal Services can provide a lot of the features you need. What people don't seem to have said is that Windows Terminal Services also uses a lot more bandwidth than Citrix, so you may pay more in the long run if you use it due to the expense associated with more bandwidth, if you need to upgrade your bandwidth.

On the other hand, you may wish to give NXServer a try, as it can proxy your Windows Terminal Services servers, and you only need one NXServer per given location to proxy all of your Windows Terminal Services servers.

NXServer compresses the TS data connections, although I'm not sure exactly how much compression you get (I haven't measured). If savings is your main interest, you may want to give NXServer a try. It's from http://www.nomachine.com/ [nomachine.com]

Run a test. Its easy

Have you run a simple terminal services test between two machines?

Printing to a local printer is easy and reliable. Havent tried much else. I've never been compelled to use citrix for anything.

My solution for remote printing issues

It's really very simple provided this nightmare is managed by us.

1. Users log on through VPN
2. Users' machines are domain members configured with local print queues
3. VPN Machines auto-register in DNS
4. We provide the remote printers and refuse to support anything else - an HP mono or color laser device
5. We create server-based print queues pointing to those remote printers as \\Machine\PrinterX with appropriate security settings to restrict access
6. Users choose to print to their assigned printers from their remote applications

I have this implemented for 7 companies.

X11

'Nuff said.

web, vpn

Your alternative is to migrate more and more applications to (ActiveX-free) web-based interfaces. You can then use whatever clients you like. Many business applications do well with web interfaces; their web interfaces are often actually more consistent than their desktop interfaces. You can then run whatever clients you like.

No matter what you do, whether people can print on local printers and access local drives is largely a networking and management issue. Yes, Citrix makes it work in one way, but there are many other ways in which that can be set up that don't involve Citrix at all. If you want to prepare for a move to any other system, fixing that might be the first step. Some possible solutions are to set up a VPN, to get separate user level bridging for those services, or to set something up with ssh.

SSL VPNs for Citrix Remote Access

You can go a few ways here - one is to leave Citrix on the LAN and use an SSL VPN for the WAN. AEP (which used to be Netilla) makes a good box for this. It'll either forward the ICA clients down in Java to the end user or you can skip Citrix and use AEP thin technology to serve apps remotely. Cool stuff. There's a white paper for this on their site aepnetworks.com. I think also it's the only SSL VPN to do Linux. Forgive the ad but it's a good box.

Eric

FreeNX!

What about FreeNX? http://freenx.berlios.de/ [berlios.de].

Open source, free, supports remote X, RDP * VNC and you can run authentication through PAM for 2-factor authentication support.

Citrix vs. Windows 2003

Honestly, if its a small business, Windows 2003 Server will work just fine. Couple that with Group Policy and you've got a nice, out of the box solution.
I use Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 at my day job. I will tell you that Citrix can handle much larger user loads than Terminal Server. In addition, it has very bandwidth friendly connections (roughly 8 times 'thinner' than RDP). The printing in the newer version has been greatly improved as well (it used to be a nightmare in 1.8).

I support roughly 500 remote users at over 50 branches over 768k lines at each location. We publish Office (Access & Outlook incl), MS IE, and a wholoe host of other critical apps (61 at last count). I can tell you that with this type of load, Citrix is the way to go.

Sure there are some open source apps and some others like Tarantella, but what kind of support do they offer? Yeah I know the open source community is around to help, but for critical applications (like ours), I'm not going to rely on the community solely to help.

Do some Googling for Network World's review of remote application suites. They had some nice info in there.

Good luck in your choice.

What about video?

If I understand the Citrix product info correctly if you use XP as the client they will run a local media player when you launch playback of video. This avoids having uncompressed video/audio data go out on to the network from the Terminal Server to the client. And the media can directly be streamed from the media server to the client. As far as I know Microsoft has no such thing for Remote Desktop.

Weird...

I clicked the reply link before 'database repairs,' submitted after, and my comment posted in here instead of the 'root/sudo' discussion.