Citrix as a front end for 9.0 - anyone using that?

I had a drop by visit by one of our enterprise architects today. He wanted me to ask the following questions:

a) Is anyone using Citrix as a front end for JDE 9.0?

b) if so, approximately how many users are you getting per core and what hardware are your using for your citrix servers? Specifically, what hardware, OS and ram for each citrix box?

We are starting to plan out migrating our South American instance to 9.0 running out of our US data center. South America will have 1100 concurrent users. We probably won't need citrix, but want to have that option in our plan.

- Gregg

Yes. I've worked with several customers using 8.12 and 9.0 and who publish Internet Explorer over Citrix (obviously, the citrix servers are always located "locally" to the ERP system). By publishing IE over citrix you gain the following :

- It is possible to limit the browser to only access the JDE system on the citrix server - therefore it can be a LOT more reliable and safer (no viruses, etc).

- support is easier (managing a handful of Citrix servers as opposed to 1000 desktop browsers)

- MUCH faster. JDE HTML is a lot better than it used to be, but it is STILL very chatty. Moving to citrix completely eliminates all performance issues

Architect of the citrix server is still similar to the original JDE Fat Client however. HTML can use a LOT of memory - but the latest citrix code is much more intelligent with sharing memory/cache etc.

Therefore, my recommendations is as follows :

1 core with 2Gb of memory can reliably support 32 concurrent IE sessions. Therefore, 8 cores with 16Gb of memory should easily support 256 concurrent users. 16 cores with 32Gb of memory easily supports 512 concurrent users.

If you need to support 1100 concurrent users, I'd recommend 3 servers with 16 cores and 32Gb apiece. Pricing out the HP DL385G7 with 16 cores and 2x16Gb PC3-8500R memory comes to about $5745. Add disk to get the price just above $6.5k. Total for 3 servers should be < $20k - which equates to about $20 per concurrent user (excluding the citrix and MS licensing !!!!)

Heres the thing - the hardware is going to be dirt cheap - but the citrix licensing is going to be astonishingly high (about $300k for 1,000 concurrent users).

Now, there are some alternatives out there. After all, you're just publishing a web browser. That web browser could now be Firefox, you're no longer limited to Internet Exploder. So why limit yourself to Windows Server just to push out a browser ? I haven't ANY experience with the following (yet) - but there are some good starting points for replacing Citrix with something else :

www.nomachine.com
www.ltsp.org

LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) looks VERY interesting....one thread on the internet actually talks about deploying a large scale LTSP infrastructure :

http://www.playingwithwire.com/tag/ltsp/

Thanks Jon.

Spot on analysis.