One of our customers plans to connect about 30 users via leased line to his NF-server. We know that Citrix is the solution of choice. But we need to estimate bandwidth requirements (20k-30k per client?), number of Citrix Servers … These 30 users need NF-access with full performance including posting and printing etc… Is this realistic? Does anyone have practical experience? Thanks in advance
It’s no problem to host 30 users in one server if it’s properly configured (follow Citrix guidelines). If You use Metaframe 1.8 20-30k will do without any problems. Just remember that printing can be bandwith consuming when printing big reports. But normally that’s no problem. What You should let Your customer think about for a while is if he should have two servers load balancing for redundancy. Thats allways our first recommendation.
We have a customer that is running the following configuration: Siemens 470 Dual PIII500 512Mb RAM 4x9Gb - NT Terminal Server 4.0 - Navision Financials 2.01B Siemens 470 Dual PIII500 2Gb RAM 4x9Gb - NT Terminal Server 4.0 - Citrix Metaframe 1.8 The first server has Terminal Server now as it will have Citrix added at a later stage (more memory will be added then too). They are running NF 2.01B on the first server and are currently running 50 Metaframe users off the second server. The servers are hosted at an ISP and they have retail stores in 4 states of Australia. They will move to 70 users and the user split will probably be 30/40. They are running about 15 users in 2 of their stores and find that the performance is acceptable running them over 128k ISDN to the ISPs local POP. The POPs are connected via megabit sized links (mostly ATM/fibre). They are though printing over this link and also browsing the internet. I think that 20-30k would be enough, but it depends on the connection they get too…POTS/ISDN/CABLE etc. Remember with printing that postscript takes up enormous amounts of bandwidth compared to PCL.
Ill add that it could be faster though! Craig Bradney Technical Manager Criterion Technology Pty Ltd P:+61-2-9436-0436 F:+61-2-9436-1004 E:craigb@c-t.com.au