WAN Acceleration takes Center Stage

We did a survey recently of IT managers and CIOs to find out the areas where

they were planning to invest in the near future. Disaster recovery, workflow

automation, server consolidation, and Voice over IP were some of the areas that

received significant votes. The point to note about these areas is that they all

require a proper and well-managed WAN infrastructure to be really effective.

You don't need a rocket scientist to tell you that you need high-speed and

redundant WAN links for your disaster recovery site. All critical data must be

backed up to the DR site on time so that you don't lose time and money

shifting to it should (God forbid!) a disaster strike. In case of workflow

automation, it isn't just about automating your company's internal business

processes alone. In order for it to be fully effective, the entire eco-system of

your company's suppliers, partners, customers, and even your own branch

offices must be taken into account. This can only happen if you have

well-managed WAN links. For instance, if you need to ensure that email gets

priority over other traffic so that your important customer orders don't get

delayed, you would need to put in place QoS policies for your WAN links.

Moreover, if you want these orders to directly and immediately move into your

manufacturing plant's ERP system, then you need to link it to the head office

with dedicated leased links. You may want to use some WAN acceleration

technology on it so that information moves faster and more efficiently. This is

just one scenario, but as you can imagine, a proper WAN infrastructure is a must

for most workflow scenarios.

Moving to server consolidation, today many organizations are toiling with the

challenge of server proliferation. There are just too many of them in the house,

be it a mail server, proxy server, web server, app server, database server, etc.

Chances are that you might even have too many of them outside the house, i.e.

across your various branches, at the ISP, customer location, etc. A proper

server consolidation strategy is required in this case to centralize the

infrastructure and reduce the number of servers. This saves cost and improves

management. Unfortunately, with centralization, the burden of ensuring seamless

connectivity between remote locations falls on the WAN links. The whole

objective of consolidation fails if the WAN links go down.

Voice over IP is also growing in popularity, and many organizations are

planning to bring it into their IT infrastructure. In order to really benefit

from VoIP, you need to move all voice traffic from your branch offices to it.

For this, you would need QoS policies, low latency, etc on the WAN links. If you

also want to do audio and video conferencing on top of this, then you'll also

need to add more bandwidth. There might also be a case where you want to

centralize not only your servers, but your entire IT infrastructure. You only

want thin clients at the remote locations so that there are no maintenance

hassles there. Here again, you need to calculate how much bandwidth is needed

and what sort of technologies to use on your WAN links for optimum performance.

So if you don't already have a proper and well managed WAN infrastructure,

then you need to start acting now. This story is all about explaining the need

for doing so, the WAN acceleration technologies that are available and their

benefits, as well as some of the products and solutions that can be used for the

job.

WAN Acceleration Tech



WAN acceleration technologies provide quick data availability between offices
spread across distant geographical areas. Branch offices depend heavily on their

head office to get regular data. Using WAN acceleration techniques can solve

this. There are several WAN acceleration appliances available today that offer

these features.

They accelerate the data transfer rate by utilizing a number of techniques

like compression, data reduction, error correction, data caching, etc. Plus,

they also utilize techniques to overcome drawbacks of protocols used over WAN.

Of course not all such appliances would support all the acceleration techniques,

so you'll have to first understand which are the techniques that are used, and

then see the ones that would be suitable for your requirement. WAN acceleration

appliances are deployed on both ends of the link where acceleration is required.

Compression: All incoming and outgoing data passes through them and

appropriate acceleration techniques are applied. The most obvious acceleration

technique is compression, wherein you use various compression algorithms to

shrink the data. This will only work for data that is compressible, such as

spreadsheets, Word documents, etc. This actually improves bandwidth utilization

while transferring data. Files that are already compressed add to the benefit.

Some WAN Acceleration Products
Juniper Networks' WXC Application Acceleration Platform benefits IT staff involved in key business initiatives such as application rollout, data center consolidation and server centralization, disaster recovery and backup, and regulatory compliance.	SILVER PEAK NX-5500 is a 3RU appliance, equipped with 2 TB of local data stored in a RAID configuration. It supports up to 50 Mbps of WAN traffic, making it ideally suited for medium and large enterprise offices.

Redundancy reduction: The other major concept of acceleration is to

reduce the data flow over the network. This is done by replacing redundant data

packets by codes. Depending upon the technique used, whole packets or streams of

packets could be scanned for redundant data. Another redundant element is the

packet header, a serious overhead on WAN links. Multiple packets can be merged

under the same header using a technique called packet coalescing. This can save

a lot of bandwidth as packet headers can be upto 60 bytes long.

Caching: This concept is primarily used in proxy servers so that

instead of going to the Internet to hunt for a website, the proxy caches it

locally to save bandwidth. A similar thing can be done here as well. The WAN

accelerators on either end inspect data being transmitted and store all

duplicate data locally on their own cache. This way, every time the WAN

accelerator at the other end asks for this data, only the code for it can be

sent and the other WAN accelerator will simply deliver it locally. This will

actually deliver LAN-speeds over WAN. This can significantly reduce traffic.

Error correction: There is one more reason that can make WAN links

slow besides heavy traffic. This is retransmission due to errors. Bandwidth is

actually being wasted if the appliance has to retransmit data everytime there's

an error. So a technique called Forward Error Correction or FEC is used by these

devices. This enables data correction at the physical layer by adding an

additional data corrective packet.

VoIP: Polycom Communicator C100S
The Polycom Communicator is a high quality speaker phone that connects to a computer for use with Skype's VoIP service. The C100S comes with just a single USB cable that provides both connectivity with a computer as well as powering the device. This means there are no extra cables to carry around and neither do you need to recharge batteries. There are five buttons on the face of the device. Two of these are volume control buttons, one mute button, and one button that opens and closes the Skype connection. Another one is used to dial a call or accept an incoming call. This Communicator is very easy to install. First, you need to plug in the device to your desktop or notebook and then install either Polycom's software or Skype client in the system. After that, you can readily use the Skype client with the C100S as the handset device to call your associates and talk to them using your Skype ID. There are many pros to this product like its high frequency response, easy volume adjustment and excellent sound quality. The speakerphone will also show up in your Windows Control Panel as an option for audio input/output, letting you use it with other applications like listening to music as well. The communicator has a sleek and handy design with a rubber casing that can protect it. There are two cons to it-one, we feel the cost is on the higher side and two the C100S does not work with Linux or the Mac. This is a good buy for executives who make VoIP calls.
	Quick Specs Price: Rs 7,740 (1 yr warranty) Key Specs: Speaker phone, Skype client, powered through USB Contact: Polycom, Delhi Tel: 26207771 E-mail: pv.krishna@polycom.com

The process of adding an FEC packet is done dynamically, depending upon

channel congestion. Normal protocols usually have the ability to correct at most

one or two data packets if they're lost, but not beyond that. If more packets

are lost, and have to be refetched, then the latency and traffic on the WAN

links increases. FEC prevents data to be retransmitted as it will automatically

generate the correct packet and give it locally.

Protocols over WAN



These include TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), CIFS (Common Internet File
System), and NFS (Network File System). These protocols need to do a number of

round trip requests and acknowledgements before sending the requested document

or files. This can cause serious congestion on the WAN links.

Bandwidth Management with m0n0wall
If you are an ISP or a network admin, responsible for allocating bandwidth to a given set of users, bandwidth shaping would surely be one of the challenges for you. Here is a free and easy way to do so using a live CD called m0n0wall available as an ISO image from m0n0.ch/wall/downloads.php.  Setting up m0n0wall Burn the ISO onto a CD and then boot. The booting process is completely interaction-free as it does not ask the user to do anything. Once done, you will see a screen with six options. Select the second option and provide the IP address. Now go to another machine connected to the same network and open the m0n0wall GUI using its IP address in a browser. The default username and password are 'admin' and 'mono.' Shaping the traffic To create IP-based bandwidth pipes with different sizes, go to the 'Traffic Shaper' option under the Firewall tab. Now go to Pipe tab option and click on the '+' sign at the bottom of the table. This will open up a new page where you have to fill in the size and name of the pipe. After providing the details click on the Save button and the 'Apply Changes' button. Next we attach this pipe to an IP address. Go to the 'Rules' tab and click on the '+' button. The 'Target' drop down on the new page lists all the pipes that have been created. Select the pipe that you want to attach with the IP. For the 'Protocol' and 'Source Port Range' (both 'from' and 'to' options) fields, select 'any' from the drop down lists. And finally, in the 'Destination' field, first select the 'Single host or Alias' in the 'type' option and then fill in the IP address of the host in the address field below and also provide the subnet mask. Now any machine that uses this IP address will get only the bandwidth allocated to him in the respective pipe. Now click on the Save button and then on 'Apply Changes.' After the configuration has been saved, reboot the machine once.
	Set up inbound/outbound rules from the m0n0wall Web GUI's Traffic Shaper page to control how traffic flows between different systems

TCP acceleration requires packet resizing for optimal performance, which is

done using TCP window adjustment algorithms. TCP acceleration also requires high

speed TCP management and round trip management to provide correction for more

than one packet loss. Similarly for CIFS and NFS caching techniques are used in

which acceleration devices can generate read-ahead or write-behind requests to

the server to reduce round trip delays.

Another technique used for faster file services over the WAN is WAFS (Wide

Area File Services). This is more of a caching technique than a technology. If

any file or request is made for first time, then that file is cached. If the

same file is requested for again, then it's provided from cached memory.

While this technique can considerably improve performance over the WAN, it

has some concerns as well. One is data protection. How secure is the data lying

in the cache. Second issue is synchronization issues. What if the link goes down

during a file transfer? Later the file it was supposed to send undergoes a

change. Will the appliance send the new file, or will it pick up the old file

from the cache and send it?

As the outsourcing wave takes a firm grip worldwide, thin client traffic is

shaping up to become a significant portion of WAN traffic. So, we have included

thin clients in this section.

The concept of thin clients is not new. All applications are hosted centrally

on the server, and all that the remote thin client does is to pass the mouse,

keyboard, and video signals over the WAN links. All processing is done at the

server end. There are many benefits of this approach. Some of these are:

1. Savings in cost of deploying desktop PCs. Thin client devices don't have
   
   much hardware. In fact they don't even have a hard drive or RAM. They just
   
   have flash memory to store the configuration and the thin client software.
2. Users can access all applications running on different servers
   
   irrespective of platforms that they are hosted on, from one or many thin
   
   client devices.
3. They give better control over applications and data. With thin client
   
   deployments, you can manage software and applications centrally on the
   
   server.
4. Easy deployment.
5. The data is safe and protected as it resides on the central server instead
   
   of the client machine. Even the communication between thin clients and
   
   servers is encrypted.
6. Troubleshooting becomes easy for system administrators. In a
   
   network-centric infrastructure, all enterprise applications and software are
   
   delivered through the server. This simplifies administration of the
   
   infrastructure because your IT support staff can focus on a few servers
   
   instead of hundreds of individual desktop PCs. In addition, any new updates
   
   or changes to security software or applications on the server will get
   
   immediately reflected across all thin clients in the enterprise.

Choosing a thin client



Before going for the thin client solution, you should first analyze the need for
it. You need to consider the following parameters before choosing a thin client:

1. Whether you are using dumb terminals for accessing existing legacy
   
   applications and need more power and flexibility for users?
2. If you have multiple offices in remote geographical locations and you want
   
   to share your central IT resources.
3. You have multiple applications running on multiple platforms and you want
   
   to give access to all these to your employees, sales partner, etc from a
   
   single device.
4. You have highly sensitive data on your centralized datacenter and you don't
   
   want to create copies of it on the user's desktop, while still giving them
   
   access.
5. You have interconnected your central and satellite offices and are using
   
   applications on a client-server architecture. Unfortunately, you have to do
   
   frequent updates on application software at central and/or satellite offices
   
   due to process change.
6. If you have distributed applications and data over a network
7. A limited IT staff compared to huge IT resources or if you want to offer
   
   end-user application support remotely.

Types of thin clients



Thin client devices are categorized in four categories-Basic, Robust, PXE and
Mobile.

Basic The basic thin client device has features like RDP, ICA and

optional terminal emulation. It lets you access basic remote terminal services

and applications from Windows or UNIX servers. You can run multi-user Windows on

a centrally managed server using either the Citrix ICA or the Microsoft RDP

protocol to remotely display on a user's desktop, the application running on the

server. This is quite cheap and provides an excellent performance. It does not

require any additional connectors like USB.

Robust These devices have some advanced features as compared to basic

thin clients. They give you features like RDP, ICA, terminal emulation and a

built-in browser. Plus, they also have ability to attach external devices such

as a printer and USB storage.

Nowadays we have Robust thin clients coming with built-in sound card, that

allow users to stream audio files on their end. They have a built-in Web

browser, which lets users to run Web applications without placing any extra

burden on their servers. Because Robust thin clients support Citrix NFuse and

legacy dumb terminal emulations, they offer users access to basic HTML pages and

replace terminal screen.

PXE It converts your existing desktop PC to thin client devices. You

just need to add PXE network cards on all desktops. These desktops get booted

remotely from the remote boot server instead of local hard disks and get

converted into basic thin clients. You can use RDP, ICA or X terminal from them.

So, if you have old desktops lying around, you can convert them into thin

clients and use them. You can use LTSP (Linux Terminal Services Project) for

this.

Mobiles & thin clients



Now-a-days you can access your corporate applications using you mobile devices.
PDAs and mobile phones are coming with thin client plug-ins, which enable users

to access corporate servers remotely when they are on move. PDAs running Windows

CE can use Window Terminal Client or VNC to access Windows Terminal services,

VNC server, etc. Idokorro Mobile Desktop is a client for Windows Terminal

Services, Remote Desktop and Virtual Network Computing (VNC) for Smartphone

devices and BlackBerry. For more details checkout http://remotedesktop.

qarchive.org/downloads. html.

With PCQLinux 2006, we have created a new install option for implementing

terminal services on PCQLinux. For this we have used latest LTSP (Linux Terminal

Service Project). This is beneficial for those organizations that want to

outsource their business processes and want BPOs to access their datacenters

over thin client infrastructure.

On the client side LTSP requires a minimum of Pentium I with 64 MB and PXE

(Pre boot- eXecutable Environment) LAN interface. It does not require any hard

disk on the client machine, because it boots the thin client from the LTSP

server. This saves lot of cost as well. We recommend using identical hardware on

all your nodes if possible. This will make your life much easier when

configuring for drivers.

HP Compaq t5720 Thin Client
This thin client from HP comes in the category of Robust thin clients, because it also has an Internet Explorer browser. You can use this device to access RDP and ICA terminal client solutions. Plus, if you are not using any of the above mentioned terminal services in your office, then also you can use this to access Web-based applications using its browser. The thin client has a heart of AMD Geode NX 1500 1.0 GHz processor, 256 MB RAM and SiS741GX Integrated/UMA graphics with 16 MB shared graphics memory. It also has built-in audio, 6 USB, one serial and parallel port. The device runs on Windows XP Embedded. In addition, you don't have to configure anything for the connections; it's simply a plug and play device. The OS resides on 512 MB flash memory that can be expanded as per user requirements. We have tested this device with both Windows Terminal server and Citrix Presentation server and tried to access both full desktop and individual applications hosted on Citrix. The experience was seamless. We did not have to do any configuration for connecting to the terminal services. However, other thin clients that we have create connections separately. We also checked the audio quality of the devices, by accessing streaming music files from the media player application hosted on Citrix; the quality was pretty decent.
	Price: Rs 22,000 (1 yr warranty) Key Specs: AMD Geode NX 1500 1 GHz, SiS741GX Integrated/UMA graphics Contact: HP India, Gurgaon Tel: 9312666760 E-mail: durai-m.singh@hp.com

Installing from PCQ Linux 2006



Boot a server class machine from the PCQLinux 2006 CD #1 and start the
installation process. Now from the install options select the 'Server'

option and select the 'Terminal Server' option from the Server options

screen. Press next to setup PCQ Linux 2006 server with terminal services. Before

starting the installation, PCQLinux installer will show you the package that you

have selected, here from the package selection list select Network services,

Legacy Network and Gnome and KDE desktop environment with KDE and GNOME

development. Once you are through with the installation, boot the machine in to

GUI and login as root. Make sure, the server on which you are configuring

Terminal Services is connected to Internet. Now, on the GUI console, open a

terminal window and on the terminal console type-in 'ltpsadmin.' This will

open a command line interface for you. Here, select 'Install/Upgrade packages.'

It will directly connect your machine to the Linux Terminal Server Project's

site and download the latest packages for you. Then installer will also ask you

for the install path; type '/opt/ltsp' and press Enter. When prompted,

select additional packages from the list shown pressing 'A' and then 'Q'.

Press Enter to confirm. The packages will be downloaded and installed.



After completing downloads, select 'Configure LTSP' from the installer and
press Enter. Here, you will be shown eleven options, one for each service.

Select all the services one by one and enable them by pressing Enter. It will

automatically configure the selected services.

DHCP server with PXE Boot 



Now, you have to configure the DHCP server on PCQLinux 2006, the diskless

clients for IP address assignments. For this edit /etc/dhcpd.conf and add the

following lines as shown below:

ddns-update-style none;



default-lease-time 21600;


max-lease-time 21600;


option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;


option broadcast-address 192.168.3.255;


option routers 192.168.3.1; #<-- Router or Gateway IP


option domain-name-servers 192.168.3.38; #<-- LTSP Server IP


option domain-name "ltsp.pcquest.local"; # <--domain name


option root-path "192.168.3.38:/opt/ltsp/i386";


#<-- NFS Share


option option-128 code 128 = string;


option option-129 code 129 = text;


subnet 192.168.3.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {


range dynamic-bootp 192.168.3.80 192.168.3.253; # <-- DHCP IP Range


filename "/lts/2.4.26-ltsp-3/pxelinux.0";


#<- Boot image File


}

Restart the DHCP server.



# service dhcpd start

Wyse S10 Thin Client

It's a small, cool looking device and takes very little space. It is also simple to install and use. The device is plug 'n' play and its thin client OS comes with integrated support for RDP and ICA sessions. All connections can be easily customized through its connection manager. It also provides support for Citrix WinFrame, MetaFrame, and Presentation Server .The device uses an AMD Geode GX 533 clocked at 400MHz and has four USB ports, one 10/100Base-T fast Ethernet port, one serial port, an audio in/audio out and a built-in Kensington slot. The product we got came with a PS/2 mouse but we were not able to find a PS/2 port on the device, although its manual claims it ships with a PS/2 mouse. However, you can use a USB mouse with it. The device has no fans or disks, comes with 32 MB RAM and no data can be stored on the thin client including the configurations. This provides data security and integrity. This thin client also supports Image loading via DHCP and FTP. Wyse also provides a thin computing software called Wyse Streaming Manager which can stream operating systems and applications from a server to thin clients as and when required by the user. This provides users with a PC like feel and all data is stored on the server thus providing data integration. According to Wyse all data transmitted during this time is encrypted.

Configuring clients



Now edit /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/ lts.conf file, and confirm the entries are

as given below:

SERVER = 192.168.3.38 (IP address of PCQLinux machine running Terminal service)


XSERVER = auto (Xserver driver for client machine)

X_MOUSE_PROTOCOL = "PS/2"



X_MOUSE_DEVICE = "/dev/psaux"


X_MOUSE_RESOLUTION = 400


X_MOUSE_BUTTONS = 3


USE_XFS = N


RUNLEVEL = 5


X_MODE_0 = 800x600


SCREEN_01 = startx

After this, issue the following commands:

# chown root:root /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/build_x3_cfg



# chmod 0755 /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/build_x3_cfg

In our above configuration, the XSERVER parameter contains the value 'Auto',

because we were using clients having different sets of display. Next step is to
enable GDM services on the terminal server, so that it can serve the GUI to the

client. In order to do so, open /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf file and scroll down to

entry and change the following entry as mentioned below:

Enable=true



HonorIndirect= true


MaxPending?= 4


MaxPendingIndirect?= 4


MaxSessions= 16


MaxWait?= 15


MaxWaitIndirect?= 15


DisplaysPerHost= 2


PingIntervalSeconds= 15


Port=177


Willing=/etc/X11/gdm/Xwilling

Save these entries in the gmd.conf and then issue the following commands:

# gdm-safe-restart



# service xfs restart

GIGABYTE Ultra Slim Thin Client
This is a hardware based thin client from GIGABYTE. It comes in a small form factor. The heart of the device is a VIA C7 1.0 GHz processor with 1 GB DDR RAM housed on GA-C7V7-ASI-RH-GB1 motherboard. It also has a built-in sound card and 10/100 Mbps LAN card. For display it has VIA UniChrome Pro + MPEG-2 decoder onboard graphics that connect to your monitor. In addition, it has 4xUSB ports for connecting additional USB devices such as USB printer and storage. It has one LPT and COM port. It's a plug and play thin client and very easy to setup. The device runs a stripped down version of Linux and gives a GUI interface once it is booted. On its desktop it shows two tools. One is used to configure the device network, mouse and keyboard settings, adding NFS and SMB shares setting, etc. The other is used to make new thin client connections to the host server. It also has a search button that searches the terminal services host running on the network. This helps users to select the hosted terminal server that they want to connect with. It supports all the terminal services like Microsoft Terminal services (RDP), VNC, Citrix, X11, Shell script and many more.
	Price: Rs 9,000 (1 yr warranty) Key Specs: VIA C7 1.0 GHz processor, 1 GB DDR RAM, 4 USB ports, onboard sound and LAN Contact: Gigabyte Technology, Mumbai Tel: 26526696 E-mail: sales@gigabyte.in

With this, your LTSP server is ready to serve the diskless nodes. Connect the

diskless nodes to the network and boot them from their PXP LAN card. And in few

seconds you will get a GUI login screen on the nodes.

Give the user name and password to login and you will get default Gnome

interface on the nodes.

Windows 2003 for diskless clients



To configure PCQLinux2006 for serving Windows clients, just open /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/lts.conf
file, and add or change the entries as given below:

RDP_SERVER = 192.168.3.29 #(Windows Terminal

Server)



RUNLEVEL = 7


X_COLOR_DEPTH = 15


SCREEN_01 = rdesktop

Server is a central deployment and thin client management solution. It

happens to be vendor independent software, i.e. at client side you can use any

thin client or you can convert your old computers into a thin client.

It can distribute OS to thin clients from a central location and manage the

thin client and sessions through web management console. All thin client devices

and users connection settings can also be managed via its web management

interface. It shows currently active thin clients and user sessions, generates

reports and includes a centralized database of thin client Syslog events.

At the client side 2X uses a small linux operating system as a ThinClient OS.

The 2X ThinClient OS itself can be retrieved from the TFTP server via PXE or

Etherboot, or it can be booted from a storage device or you can just boot it

through a CD-ROM as a live CD.

Using the LTSP Admin Tool you can watch all the required services that are needed for LTSP

All connection settings are stored on the management console and upon

boot-up, thin clients connect to the server and retrieve the settings that will

determine how and which terminal server they will connect.

Settings can be applied to an individual thin client (by MAC address), by

username, by group (effectively capturing all the members of the group), or by

organizational unit (OU). The Server software can run on Windows as well as on

Linux.

Deploying 2X



Installing 2X ThinClient Server is simple, once the server is installed launch
it. First it will ask you to create a administrative account. Once it has been

created you can login to 2X's console with it.

When you login for the first time, it will ask you to configure the

connections and provide the 2X ThinClient OS image. Here click on configure

connection button, a new window will open. Here provide a name for the

connection and choose which protocol you want to use.

By default 2X supports its own 2X published applications, Citrix published

applications, ICA and windows RDP protocol. You can also change a protocols

default settings if you want. To do this click on Add Protocol button, a new

window will open here provide a name for new protocol and specify is type i.e.

RDP or ICA etc.

In 2X ThinClient Server, you can customize default protocol settings and choose what kind of encryption, bandwidth, services, display, etc to use

Now specify settings like how much bandwidth should be used by the protocol,

you can also enable or disable the encryption and you can also customize the

display settings. Now click on Users tab to choose which users will be logging

on from clients, here you can either choose the users from windows active

directory or create local users for 2X.

Once you have added the users and specified the protocol to use, last basic

configuration is left to specify the 2X ThinClient OS image. To do this you need

download 2XThinClient OS image from their website. If you plan to boot your thin

clients through CD, just burn the image and boot your ThinClients with it. If

you plan to use 2XThinClient's inbuilt TFTP server, from its main console

choose ThinClientOS under Thin Clients menu.



In the new window click on Browse button and provide the path of the downloaded
2XThinClient image. Now you can boot your thin clients with PXE boot option and

they will automatically boot through 2XThinClient OS.

After the 2X ThinClientOS has booted, it obtains its connection settings from

the 2X ThinClientServer. These settings are then used to connect to the terminal

server. After 2X ThinClientOS has booted, it obtains the IP address of 2X

ThinClientServer from the network settings returned by the DHCP server.

Once the clients have connected to the server, you can login back into the 2X

management console to manage the thincleint and sessions.



In main console the 'Sessions' node shows you the users that are or have
connected to a terminal server. There are 3 sub-nodes for currently active

sessions, past sessions and erroneous sessions.

To manage a thin client, click on the 'Manage' node under 'Thin Clients'. All

thin clients will be listed in the right pane. Here you can manage things like

Hostname, Printer to be used, input devices, display settings, logging etc.

Deploying Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server
This is an application virtualization solution from Citrix, available on all major platforms. It allows users to access applications, central business resources or full desktops remotely from the servers. Administrators can manage everything centrally. We implemented Citrix Presentation Server on a Windows 2003 Server. Before deploying it, you require ASP.NET 1.1 and the latest Javaruntime installed. Configuring IIS with ASP Open the Manage Server console from Administrative tools and add the Application Server role. This will automatically install IIS and configure ASP.NET. Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server Now, from Citrix CD pack. Install Citrix License Server, Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server and its components, and management console in that order. Once all the components are installed. You need to reboot the machine once and Citrix Presentation Server is ready to host your application for thin client users. Publishing applications In order to publish application on Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server. Open Citrix Meta console from Start>Programs>Citrix>Management Console. This will open an interface as shown in the screen shot. Here on left panel you can set the various options like application publishing, users policies, deploying applications on the server depending on the users needs. Let's see how you can publish application on the Presentation server. From the left panel select the Application option and right-click on it. From the context menu select 'Publish New Application.' This will take you through the wizard to create an application profile that you want to publish. The wizard will ask you the name of the application, description and the location of the application and working directory of the application. You also need to set up screen resolution and color settings for the application you are publishing. Finally add the presentation sever name and user permission to host the application and finish the wizard. With this the application gets published. Using published applications Configure the thin client with ICA protocol and also give the IP address of the presentation server. The thin client also lets you search for the published applications. Select the application that you want to access from the thin client and connect to the remote presentation server. Once connected, you will be authenticated and the selected published application would be served at the thin client. It can also be accessed from the thick client running Citrix client component called 'Citrix Program Neighborhood.'
	Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite lets you monitor entire server farms from a single console. This includes network security, alerts, etc

Anil Chopra, Anindya Roy, Anubhav Verma, Sanjay Majumder, Swapnil Arora and

Vijay Chauhan