Citrix Access Suite 4 for Windows Server 2003: The Official Guide, Third Edition

OVERVIEW

Citrix Access Suite is a complementary product suite to Microsoft's Terminal Services (included with Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Services Edition, Windows 2000 Server, and Windows Server 2003). Today, Citrix serves nearly 180,000 customers worldwide, facilitating a seamless user experience in heterogeneous computing environments, as well as application delivery across bandwidth-restricted connections. Citrix Access Suite 4 is the most significant update from Citrix in over five years , with over 50 new features compared with Access Suite 3.0.

Citrix Access Suite includes the following products:

• – Citrix Presentation Server (Enterprise Edition) for virtualized application delivery for both Windows and UNIX applications

• – Citrix Access Gateway (Advanced Edition) for universal SSL VPN remote access

• – Citrix Password Manager for enterprise single sign-on

In this chapter, we discuss the new features in version 4 as well as the enhancements that the Access Suite brings to Terminal Services, including:

• – Application support Access Suite 4 provides several tools, including Application Isolation Environment, which allows the access platform to support applications that won't run with just Terminal Services, and to support a larger number of applications running on the same server.

• – End-user experience Access Suite provides a myriad of features such as Citrix Web Interface, Speed Screen, and Universal Print Driver. These features dramatically improve the user experience and reduce administrative costs.

• – Enterprise management tools The included tools provide better manageability. Citrix provides Resource Manager, Installation Manager, and Network Manager, as well as a host of embedded management tools that present administrators with critical information as well as the automation of enterprise server environments.

• – Scalability Companies who have tried to use Terminal Services without Citrix for more than 100 concurrent users understand the tremendous challenges with Microsoft's Network Load Balancing, and lack of memory or CPU management. Citrix provides true Application Load Balancing, along with CPU and Memory utilization management. Citrix tests all releases and tools at the 1,000+ server farm Citrix e Labs.

• – Security Access Suite 4 provides encrypted access for all enterprise users from any location, without having to open firewall holes. Citrix provides and supports two options for secure remote access: Secure Gateway (included as a software component of Citrix Presentation Server) and Citrix Access Gateway (a SSL VPN appliance). Both provide a secure platform by which users can access the environment literally from anywhere , anytime , and anyplace, regardless of the firewall configurations ( assuming the environment allows SSL [port 443] traffic). Although Terminal Services RDP traffic is encrypted, it requires that port 3389 be open on the Data Center firewall as well as at the user's location(s). The Citrix Access Gateway is their robust SSL VPN appliance solution, and offers connectivity not just to Citrix Presentation Server, but to any corporate resource. And the Citrix Access Gateway provides advanced user access policies for granular control of data and application access.

• – Connectivity Universal access to applications from any client device, to applications on Windows or UNIX platforms. Although Microsoft now supports client access from Macintosh OS X and Windows clients , Citrix not only provides support for Mac and Windows, but also support for over 200 client operating systems, including most flavors of UNIX and Linux, DOS, and embedded devices.

Table 3-1 details the Citrix Access Suite value-add features compared to Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services.