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Tips for building remote business networks

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14th Sep 2010
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Ramsac’s Robert May looks at the latest technologies catering for server-based small business networks.

Microsoft’s Windows Small Business Server (SBS) is the dominant system for networks serving between five and 75 users or machines (depending on your license terms). However, experience suggests it becomes cheaper to unbundle the SBS offering and buy separate software server components once you go beyond 25-30 users. There are two versions of SBS, Standard and Premium. Premium includes SQL Server which is now required for many practice management and CRM systems.

Virtualisation and Storage
In the past couple of years, the IT market has embraced virtualisation, and demand has filtered down into the small business market. As Simon Hurst explained in his 2007 introduction to the subject, virtualisation is like a Tupperware IT container that you can put in your server (think refrigerator) to hold different users’ data and applications separately.

The latest version of Microsoft Hyper-V, included with Release 2 of Windows Server 2008, introduced ‘live migration’, so you can move running virtual machines between servers without affecting users. The rival VMware system has included this facility for some time, but it’s been expensive. Now you can do it out of the Microsoft box.

Storage is a massive issue for small network users, both in terms of volume and flexibility. I recently saw a forecast suggesting that demand for storage would increase at a compound rate of over 50% per year for the next five years, and this is in line with our own experience.

Windows Server 2008 R2 includes file categorisation to improve data management, but the of what’s stored on a network server is never accessed. Trying to get users to clear space themselves is largely a waste of time. Most people will spend half a day of their time working through their data (if they do it at all), opening and reading all of their Word documents, only to clear about 5% of space. Not a great use of time...

So, the answer for the time being seems to be to throw storage at the problem, which means more people are moving into shared storage. Virtualisation is also driving the move to shared storage, as you really need to have your virtual servers on shared storage if you want the flexibility and resilience that virtualisation promises.

Remote Access: Terminal Services v Citrix
Remote Desktop Services, formerly known as Terminal Services, is a component of Microsoft Windows (both server and client versions) that allows a user to access applications and data on a remote computer over a network, using the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). RDS or Terminal Services is based on the concept of a thin-client terminal, where the local PC just controls the Windows interface and keyboard commands, and the server handles the application, data processing and storage. With RDS, the entire desktop of the computer running terminal services can be made accessible to a remote client machine.

Previous versions of Terminal Services (2003 and before) were only able to deliver applications as part of a second desktop. That posed a challenges for end users, as they had to be aware that they were working on two separate desktops, one remote and one local.

But Windows Terminal Services 2008 has moved on significantly since Windows Server 2003 and addressed two areas where it lagged behind Citrix. With Terminal Services 2008 Microsoft introduced a Web based front-end, and “published applications” which had been two of the main reasons why customers preferred to pay the additional licensing costs of Citrix over and above Terminal Services.

The published applications facility in Terminal Services 2008 works in a very similar way to both Citrix Presentation Server and XenApp, with the ability to deliver individual applications seamlessly to a user’s local desktop. So Terminal Services 2008 should certainly be considered by customers who need published applications, but even Microsoft advises that Citrix is the better option for more than a handful of published applications.

The Web front end, meanwhile, allows remote users to connect to either published applications, or a full desktop, via a web browser. In our experience the majority of Citrix/Terminal Services implementations have set up to support remote working. Citrix’s web interface avoided the need to set-up a separate secure virtual private network, which until now was the only way to set up a Terminal Services session remotely.

The web interface for Terminal Services 2008 is very similar to Citrix’s web interface, but still requires a multiple login process. Terminal Services 2008 forces you to log on once to the web front-end and then log on a second time, with a different username format, to start the application or desktop. According to Microsoft this can be resolved by purchasing a third-party application, but as a default it is frustrating to enter credentials twice, and will certainly present an additional training and support overhead for end-users.

With Citrix a user enters their credentials once when they initially connect to the web interface, and can then access their published applications or their full desktop.

However the main drawback with the Terminal Services 2008 web interface is that because it uses a Windows ActiveX control, it will not work with Apple Mac machines. Companies looking to introduce Terminal Services for remote working with staff who use Apple Macs at home will still need to go with Citrix, the only option. Therefore, for situations where there are any remote Apple Mac clients, Citrix is really the only option.

Citrix has a small performance advantage over Terminal Services when used internally over a high-speed local network, due to the ability of the Citrix client (ICA) to handle graphics more efficiently than the Terminal Services client (RDP). The performance differences over lower speed connections are even more significant. As the amount of available bandwidth drops, Terminal Services performance drops off much more quickly than Citrix. This issue is most marked where users with mobile phones or 3G data cards are trying to connect remotely, especially where there is no 3G signal and their connection is via GPRS.

There are similar pros and cons on the cost side of the equation. With higher licensing, support and maintenance costs that are not required for Terminal Services, a  Citrix solution will have higher initial and ongoing costs than Terminal Services 2008. But Terminal Services 2008 only runs on Windows Server 2008. Based on the Vista operating system kernel, Windows Server 2008 may cause problems with older applications that Vista does not support. In those situations you would need to run Citrix on Windows Server 2003, which is based on the same kernel as Windows XP.

In conclusion, for relatively basic scenarios where virtual desktops are required for users on a local area network (LAN), for example to support a small number of thin client terminals, or a small number of published applications, then Terminal Services 2008 may be the best option due to its lower cost base.

However Citrix makes much more sense where there are a significant number of remote users, as there’s a high chance that at least some of the remote workers will have Apple Macs at home, and anyone working with low speed connections, such as mobile users, will find performance considerably better with Citrix.
 

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