What is Citrix and what is it good for?
If you’re referring to the company, they are the makers of Winframe. I don’t remember the term they use for the technology, but it’s basically an application server. Your applications don’t run from your local system, they run through the network.
If that’s what you’re asking about and want more info, I can dig up some old documentation. We were looking into it for a company I used to consult for.
Citrix also makes an application called MetaFrame that we use to run Windows NT on a Unix workstation. It seems to do a decent job, but the NT platform that hosts it is not up to the challenge, so it tends to be sluggish.
Among other things, I believe it lets you run one computer from multiple workstation clients, each of them experiencing it as if they were seated in front of the host (server) computer. Or maybe that’s Terminal Server.
I’m a FileMaker geek. Every customer who installs Citrix ends up calling us with networking problems messing up FileMaker Server. (Of course it would help if they would quit trying to use one little NT box as file server, print server, email server, FileMaker Server, backup software server, and intermittent personal workstation!)
Don’t trust any software named after a lemon.
Citrix is the company that develops MetaFrame (they also used to develop WinFrame). Basically, the whole concept is based upon Windows NT Terminal Server. You install the Windows NT Terminal Server OS on your server. You then install the Terminal Server client on your workstations, connect to the Terminal Server box, and run all your applications off the Server. At that point, your workstations basically become dumb GUI terminals that receive display output from the Server. The advantage of this configuration is that you can install all of your applications on a single server and have multiple users connect to the server to do work. Also, you don’t need as powerful a workstation (since it’s just acting as an input and display terminal anyway).
MetaFrame enhances the basic functionality of Terminal Server with a whole slew of features (published applications, print services, etc…) and comes with it’s own server and client software. I think it also introduces data compression across data links to speed up screen refreshes on the output side. The drawback (not really a problem with MetaFrame itself, but rather with the whole concept in general) is that you need large amounts of server computing power to be able to handle the multiple users that will be connecting to your MetaFrame server.
It’s like pcAnywhere, but more advanced.
Citrix is the company who makes MetaFrame, an extension to Windows terminal services (either in Terminal Server Edition or Windows 2000 terminal services) is based on Citrix’s Multi-Win technology. Terminal services effectively divides an application server into a bunch of different virtual machines, so that a bunch of users can run applications on the same server without interfering with each other. Each user logged into the terminal server has separate per-user settings not available to other users. Any per-machine settings on the application server apply to all users.
Citrix’s first product was WinFrame, a multi-user version of NT 3.51. There’s also a version of MetaFrame that does the same thing with Unix.
Windows terminal services is good for several things: centralizing deployment and updates of Windows applications; running Windows apps on client machines that couldn’t normally support them (since the clients only have to display output, not run the apps); and getting access to PC-requting applications in environments where PCs don’t work, to name three. It does require lots of power on the server side, but almost nothing on the client. Using MetaFrame, it’s possible to “run” Windows 2000 on a 386–something you cannot do otherwise.
MetaFrame runs atop Windows terminal services. You ask what it’s good for: it adds a somewhat faster display protocol, client drive remapping, display of individual applications, terminal session windows that fit seamlessly into the client display, and publication of application links onto a Web page. With Feature Release 1, MetaFrame also supports true-color display (otherwise, Windows terminal sessions display in 256 colors max) and caches user input to improve response time. Until Win2K terminal services came out, MetaFrame was required for adding client printer remapping and remote control of client sessions.
(There’s more, but I’m trying to avoid writing a book here and this is long enough already.)
Terminal services is not not pcAnywhere. That’s remote control software; while there are remote control capabilties in Win2K terminal services, MetaFrame is for application serving–the licensing is too expensive to make it a viable remote admin product. You can use a terminal connection to remotely adminster an application server, however.