Chapter 4 - Designing the Thin Client Solution

Abstract

This chapter summarizes the Citrix MetaFrame environment design, and the minimum requirements for the server components—number of processors, amount of RAM, and storage are determined. The requirements are based on the number of concurrent users and the applications used by the users. Scaling up is preferable when direct asynchronous connections and scaling out for all other situations because of the redundancy it offers. The Citrix MetaFrame server needs to be placed nearest to the data sources and should be provided to the end-users. If multiple servers are load balanced, all the servers that are providing a single application should be placed on the same network segment as the data source server. MetaFrame supports multiple protocols for connections as well as direct asynchronous connections. For each client that connects, the server needs to have a waiting connection that uses the protocol that the client has installed. The chapter explains that if a client uses TCP/IR it cannot connect to an IPX/SPX connection waiting on the server and it needs to find a TCP or IP connection.