Anybody made the leap from XenApp to vanilla RDS and App-V?

[Ric_]

Well the title says it all...

As most people know, I LOVE Citrix products but times are hard and money needs to be saved. One option for saving money is to migrate to vanilla RDS from XenApp since the Microsoft offering has matured a lot of late.

My question is this... has anybody else done this? Can you think of any pitfalls?

[User3204]

hmm s'funny, times are hard and money needs to be saved, so I'm thinking of moving from PC desktops to Citrix Xen...

[Ric_]

hmm s'funny, times are hard and money needs to be saved, so I'm thinking of moving from PC desktops to Citrix Xen...

I'm after saving on licensing and can save approx. £3k per year by not renewing my Subscription Advantage. The question is, can I do without the XenApp goodies? I guess the big one is load balancing as I do have 3 models of server in my farm :-\

[ChrisH]

You can apply a different weighting to the different servers in the farm. I don't know how well it works as it is a future project for me. I am currently only using SIMS.Net as a published app and it works fine. It will will work even better when I move away from XP so I can use the pass through authentication.

[Ric_]

I did just have another thought... I'm a heavy user of Secure Gateway which seems to work very nicely with any client you throw at it. Published apps on your phone are the geekiest kind of cool!

So, how well does RD Gateway and RD Web Access work with non-Windows devices (I'm looking at you Apple fanbois for help here - OS X and iOS).

[localzuk]

The big deal breaker for me is still multimedia support - it just isn't good enough in RDP on its own.

[Ric_]

The big deal breaker for me is still multimedia support - it just isn't good enough in RDP on its own.

The question is whether it is better enough to continue to support the £3k per year Subscription Advantage that I pay. For the same cost, I can buy a new server!

[andrew-virtusolve]

The big deal breaker for me is still multimedia support - it just isn't good enough in RDP on its own.

Agree, but this is where the hybrid model suits most schools, for the average user RDS using RDP is very usable, especially under 2008. Then have a smaller footprint of XenDesktop or View for your heavyweight multimedia, HDX as a protocol for media performance is epic, we have one company that uses VDI using it for AutoCAD - am not joking!