Remote office solutions - Possible SCENARIOS? 1

[acle]

We want to study a solution to centralize as much as possible our services.
Our central it department is in Switzerland and we want to centralize our office in Germany and Italy using Citrix metaframe so that the servers are in Switzerland.
Italy and Germany are 10 users windows nt 4.0 domain.
Our goal is to keep just the terminal client and printers on-site all the rest to keep it in Switzerland.
Someone has some suggestion on how to implement a solution like this? Is it possible to keep also the Domain controller in Switzerland?
Many thanks for your help.
Regards.

CIX

 

[Ogi]

Hi,

You can do this with Citrix, however, consider resiliant links between your remote offices and head office.

Are you using the Internet or direct lines of some description?

That would then depend on your configuration.

Give us some more info and I'm sure many people will recommend options for you.

Cheers,
Carl.

 

[acle]

Hi,
we have about 10-15 client in each remote office and we want to use a 512 kbps VPN link. Do you think that can work.
If yes, I saw several products from Citrix, do you know wich one is the best for this kind of solution?
Many thanks.

cix

 

[ascotta]

I would have thought that you could stick 10 - 15 users down that link. Providing there is not much other traffic going up and down. (HTTP SMTP etc).

Given 2 sites with 10 - 15 users, I would have at least 2 load balanced Citrix boxes in Switzerland. I would be tempted to have Web Interfaces in Switzerland too. Given a VPN probably no requirement for Secure Gateway. So Presentation Server 3.0 is the kiddo for you. Run either Programme Neighbourhood or PN Agent at the remote sites.

Some planning here WHast happens when on of your lines goes down. You know JCB digs through cable.



[blue]Arguably the best cat skinner around ! [/blue]

Cheers
Scott

 

[ascotta]

Stupid Scott.......

Forgot to ask a vital question...

What applications will they be running and you would have to make sure there is no requirement for local data in Germany or Italy (or minimal gets complicated if there is)

[blue]Arguably the best cat skinner around ! [/blue]

Cheers
Scott

 

[acle]

Principally we need file server resource (office documents), Lotus Domino and SAP.
In Switzerland we have a SAN (Storage Area Network) to manage this resources.
From what I understand Presentation server is intended to run an application on my client that start a terminal session and directly run an application on a remote server, but how can i manage the data resources, is it possible to map on my client using a terminal session?
What do you mean to have web interfaces? What is JCB?
Many thanks.

cix

 

[ascotta]

My appologies a JCB is a digging machine well known to dig up comms lines when you don't want it to happen.

Lets forget Web Interfaces just now It is just a web based access to Citrix applications.

If all your data is on SAN in Switzerland then yes mapping 1 or several drives can be made very easily.

If on the other hand their data is in Italy or Germany then that traffic will contend with ICA traffic. Although ICA is nice and thin, it does require some bandwidth to be available other wise disconnections will occur.

However if your data is in Switzerland then I don't see any major problems.

[blue]Arguably the best cat skinner around ! [/blue]

Cheers
Scott

 

[acle]

We decide to install in Switzerland a Bi-processor xeon with 2gb of RAM with Presentation Server 3.0 to control all the users from Italy and Germany.
Firtst we will test in our lab the solution.
Many thanks to Scott and Carl for your precious help.

cix