Since this is about a program, but its not a hard question, so I’ll ask it here. What can you tell me about Terminal Services for a Windows 2k3 server? A co-worker was talking to me about it but I’m not sure what it does or how it works. Can anyone shed some light on this?
It lets you work on the other computer remotely.
I use it all the time to log on to servers and individual PCs from my desk. Once logged in, you have whatever rights your account would have on the remote computer and can do pretty much everything you can if you were sitting in front of it.
thanks for clarifying what it was Reality.
Any idea if there are costs for each user? I heard you need to buy a license for each user that intends to connect to the server. Is that true?
Does a client only need Remote Desktop Connection to use this service?
The software is built in to Windows XP (It’s under “Start” “All Programs,” “Accessories,” “Communications”), so you don’t need to buy it. I think they’re calling it Remote Desktop now; it’s also part of Win2000 and Win2003.
AFAIK, there are no licensing costs, but that’s not my area.
We’re talking about a couple of things, here.
Remote Desktop (the service) is built into Windows XP. With that, you can log into a Windows XP Professional desktop remotely (as the name implies) from any workstation that has Remote Desktop Connection (the client) - default in XP and Vista, downloadable for Mac OS X, and I believe there are *nix clients, too. When you connect, you get the entire desktop as the person you logged in as.
However, in Server 2003, Remote Desktop is properly called Terminal Services. It’s the same idea taken up a notch - basically a version of X Windows. Using this, multiple people can each log into the server simultaneously using the same Remote Desktop Connection software as above, and each gets their own desktop and rich experience. There are two versions when you enable the software - Administration mode allows two administrators to log in at a time for free; Application mode allows multiple users, each which requires a license.
The terminal server would need to have all required client applications installed, and certain programs require special installation, while some don’t work at all.
The next step up is Citrix Presentation Server (formerly MetaFrame), which sits on top of a Windows Terminal Server and gives you more flexability such as deploying via a webpage, deploying specific applications only, etc. This requires a Citrix AND Microsoft license per user, however IIRC Citrix is concurrent, while MS is not.