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We would like to welcome Terminal Services MVP Patrick Rouse to our team of authors as he presents his first article to MSTerminalServices.org readers. This article describes what terminal server session sharing is, why one would use it, and how it's configured in Citrix Presentation Server.
This article will explore the use of Virtual IP addressing in the Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 environment including how to assign virtual IP addresses for network communication and licensing compliance.
This three part article will delve into the underlying structure of the complex load management subsystem in Presentation Server and discuss best practices for implementing and monitoring this process.
2X has just launched 2X ApplicationServer version 4, a full SBC product offering Published Application, Seamless Integration, Load Balancing, SSL support and clients for several platforms. Let's take a look at this product and see what it offers.
MSTerminalServices.org recently received a stylish makeover with a totally fresh site design. To celebrate we are offering free MSTerminalServices.org t-shirts to our visitors! Read on to find out how you can win.
This article concludes the series by demonstrating how to create resource groups and resource access policies that control user access to resource groups.
In the second part of this series, I will discuss some of the disadvantages of Server Based Computing and what the limitations of Windows Server Based Computing are. We’ll also talk about what you need to know about to make your Server Based Computing initiative a success.
In Part 2 of this article series, I showed you how to create an enterprise certificate authority that could be used to issue SSL certificates to your Terminal Service gateway. In this article, I will continue the discussion by showing you how to configure the Terminal Service gateway to interact with the certificate authority that you created.
In this article I will go into the extensive search you need to do to find a culprit printer driver haunting your farm. This article should reduce the wild goose chase back to a 10 minute job.
Server Based Computing is hot these days. Seems like Server based Computing is the way to go. But is it? Is Server Based Computing a goldmine or a snakepit?
In this article I will describe the benefits of Resource Manager, the configuration of Resource Manager, and how to best use Resource Manager during system administration.
In this article, I will continue the discussion by showing you how to confirm that the necessary services are installed correctly. From there, I will show you how to create a certificate authority that issues the certificates used to encrypt gateway traffic.
In this article I will explain how you can get your own customized RDP client and create an MSI file so you can deploy it remotely using Group Policies, SMS or any other tool you may have in place.
In Terminal Server/Citrix environments there are always applications that aren’t exactly mainstream. Usually they do not come with proper management tools. You of course want to manage them in a professional manner, preferably using Group Policy. In this article I’ll show you how to go about this.
In part two we will cover another great modification to the RDP client you can do that will greatly enhance security on your Terminal Services environment.
In this two part article series we will check some useful options available for customizing the Microsoft Remote Desktop client, showing you all the tools to get the job done, in a step-by-step guide!
In Part 2 of this article series I continue the discussion on the best freeware tools, focusing on Security, Troubleshooting, Policies, Profiles, and more.
I will examine the popular question of the necessity of third party add-ons within an SBC environment and give advice on whether it is a good idea or not.
Beside the standard tools provided in the product there are also many wonderful tools available for the Terminal Server field. In this article I will describe the most used favorite tools and software, which are available for free.
If Remote Desktop for Administration is enabled on a server that’s running Windows Server 2003, then the server can not be configured to use offline files and vice versa. In this article, I will explain why that is and how you can decide which of these two features is more important to you.
Resuming from where we left, in this second part we will finish discussing the software based options, take a quick peek at the hardware options out there and conclude with some useful advice!
In this second part of the series we will talk about how you can determine if you have Fileserving performance issues and how you can prevent this from occurring by adhering to best practises.
In this article I will describe the technology involved in seamless applications and give you some insight as to why seamless does not always work 100% correctly.
In this article I will show the different parameters for creating and joining the farm and will also describe how to create a farm with a local database.
Fileserving very often is a much underestimated part of Terminal Server environments. Improperly configured fileserving components can wreak havoc on your performance. In this two-part article we will explore fileserving in Terminal Server environments and how you can make sure that you get the best performance out if it.
In this article I will try to explain how logon time might increase, and how to tackle and improve logon time where possible. Users are easily annoyed with long logon/logoff times making it harder to accept an SBC solution.
While we as administrators often spend a considerable amount of time planning our production environment, Disaster Recovery issues with complex Citrix environments remain the weak point of many installations. This three-part article will focus on effective disaster recovery strategies for organizations of any size.
In this article, I will discuss why 64-bit servers may be a worthwhile investment for organizations that are currently using Windows Server 2003 based terminal servers.
The use of Server Based Computing for home workers or connecting a small branch office is very appealing to small companies. However this often means that most companies buy their first Terminal Server without any prior knowledge of the technology. Here are some useful recommendations to keep in mind when purchasing your first Terminal Server.
The main question most companies just starting to use SBC technology have is if Citrix is needed or not. This article is for everyone that is now looking at Terminal Services/Citrix as a new technology to be used in-house and are now at a crossroad, having to decide/justify if such an expensive add-on like Citrix is required or not.
In the article Terminal Server Environment Basic Concepts I already described the basic concepts/rules necessary to have a stable and controllable Terminal Server Infrastructure. Two of the described concepts in that article are chronology of the installation order and the 100% “equality” of all the servers in the Farm. To accomplish this you should use silent setups and a deploy mechanism to install applications on your servers. In this article we are going to detail how to install and deploy those applications with the above mentioned concepts in mind.
Bandwidth Management is one of the biggest challenges we face as server based computing engineers. This article is the third and final in a short series about Bandwidth Management. In this article we will look at third-party solutions for protecting and guaranteeing the bandwidth required for session performance as it applies to LAN and WAN traffic.
If you have spent much time on this Web site, then you probably know that if properly deployed, the Terminal Services can greatly ease a network’s administrative burden, and can be a huge cost saver for a company. In spite of its many benefits, switching all of the users in the company from a client/server deployment to a thin client deployment is a big undertaking. In this article, I will discuss how to go about performing a pilot deployment for your new thin client environment.
Terminal/Citrix environments by their very nature allow interactive access to their servers. Interactive access to a server also happens to be the Valhalla in hackerland. Seems like you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, right? There’s only one thing to do: secure those servers! One of the tools you should use to secure your servers is the Security Configuration Wizard.
A lot has been said in the past about the licensing models of Terminal Server and Citrix. Interpreting the exact results of certain choices may not always be fully clear beforehand. This article will help you understand and give you some tips along the way.
This articles describes what MUI (Multilingual User Interface) is and the main reasons why it is a must on corporate environments dealing with multiple language requirements.
While we as administrators often spend a considerable amount of time planning our production environment, Disaster Recovery issues with complex Citrix environments remain the weak point of many installations. This three-part article will focus on effective disaster recovery strategies for organizations of any size.
Most IT professionals think that Terminal Servers are complex and difficult to administrate. This feeling is further enforced by stories where users complain about low performance, strange behavior and so on. This article will describe the basic concepts to keep in mind for Terminal Server Environments. Adopting these concepts in your environment will result in an easily manageable terminal server farm.
Bandwidth Management is one of the biggest challenges we face as server based computing engineers. This article is the second in a short series about Bandwidth Management, in which we will focus on leveraging the advanced features of Presentation Server 4.0 Policy to control bandwidth consumption.
In this review I will take a look at 2X LoadBalancer. My review of 2X LoadBalancer was performed with three Windows 2000 Server systems. One server acted as the “gateway” and the two remaining servers acted as the Terminal Servers.
While we as administrators often spend a considerable amount of time planning our production environment, Disaster Recovery issues with complex Citrix environments remain the weak point of many installations. This three-part article will focus on effective disaster recovery strategies for organizations of any size.
With Presentation Server 4.0 Citrix released a version with a major overhaul on functionality. The most drastic one - in my eyes - was the new printing engine. In this article I will talk about it, now that it has been around for quite a while.
Security is important for just about any computer network, but it tends to be especially important in a Terminal Service environment. Think about it for a moment; users are running applications directly on your server. If a vulnerability exists in an application or in the server’s configuration exists, then the vulnerability could potentially be exploited in an effort to gain access to the underlying operating system. That being the case, it’s worth spending some extra time making sure that you have done a good job securing the Terminal Services. In this article, I will share some security techniques with you.
One of the biggest challenges in Terminal Server environments are printer related topics, where the drivers’ challenge is the main part of it. A lot of third party manufacturers have developed products to beat these challenges. Are these third party products useful in the printer challenge?
VBScript and WMI are very powerful toolsets that allow server based computing administrators to perform some very complex, and sometimes mundane, tasks with consistency and speed. This article series serves as a look into leveraging this toolset to simplify the configuration of server and user settings. Part three of this article series will look at Citrix Presentation Server’s MFCOM Object. We will explore the settings and properties that may be managed via VBScript and WMI.
Microsoft has long been making inroads into application hosting with the Terminal Services improvements. Given the added cost Citrix brings, why not just use Terminal Services? We'll take a look at where the gaps remain between the products and why you might be happy with a Terminal Services solution.
2X announced on Wednesday that it will give away 1 million thin clients, in a bid to demonstrate the advantages of thin client computing, allowing any organization to solve the management and security issues of fat clients.
Citrix has a few client versions available. Choosing a specific type could look good in the beginning, but turn sour at a later stage. This article should help you fully understand the consequences of a client type, the features and the infrastructure needed.
One of the main challenges in the Terminal Server environment is the high usage of resources like the CPU. In this article we are going to take a look at what causes this high usage and what you can do to control the resource usage.
It may seem strange to talk about applications written for an operating system that has been obsolete for at least ten years, but believe it or not, there are a huge number of companies that still depend on legacy DOS applications for mission critical tasks. Unfortunately, DOS applications do not tend to work well with the Windows Terminal Services. In this article, I will discuss some of the underlying reasons for this incompatibility. After doing so, I will then go on to discuss some possible resolutions for the various compatibility issues.
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