if you work for a medium to large company (200+) what does your company use for application distribution? We have been running a very outdated system and are looking to move up where I work, I have a few ideas of where I want to go with this, Just wondering what systems others were using.
Mainly if you like the system and its ease of use for setting up new users as they come in. Also if a system goes down how quickly can you get them running on new hardware.
The one option I am kinda focusing on is a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. This way we can make an image for each department and set up systems almost instantly. It would also be really easy to deal with virus and spy ware issues, as they would get a fresh desktop every day they log in. It would also make replacing hardware much easier as they can pick right back up where they left off. Upgrading software would be a breze as we would only need to chainge the main image and not every system.
Well it all depends on the type of applications and the type of people you distrubute too. 200 people is actually very small :)…
There is Vmware VDI infrastructure using something like Neoware/HP appliances for PC’s.
Another controlled option is Citrix Metaframe using a published desktop with Neoware/HP appliances.
If you want people to have full desktops Citrix published apps is one option, another for locally install applications automatically via Policy’s is Altiris (there are quite a few in this arena)
One thing to mention it depends on what/who your audience is, contact center agents/collection agents woudl be better suited in a finely controled environment like citrix but if you have people who kind of need a full desktop but don’t (IE accounting/hr people) then VDI’s really work well.
Xen App(formerly Citrix Presenation Server) for app deployment :tup:
You can publish full desktops in presentation server…the only time that sucks is when they run really graphic/processor intense programs like CAD.
We have a number of customers who host their citrix server in our data center…then buy a DS3/T1 back to their office and publish whole desktops over Citrix to their location…works great…
Anyways…I would def go with a virtual desktop solution…only short comings would be direct attached devices are sometimes an issue.
Where I work, we’re on a limited budget, so I had to get creative with application distribution. All applications for users are delivered into an ‘Applications’ folder on their desktop. If the login script detects that a piece of software they are supposed to have is not installed, it will bring up an ‘Install’ icon (example: Install Microsoft Office 2003). The user can click on the icon and it runs an .msi file that I create that installs the software without any interaction from the user whatsoever. Once finished, it also inserts the icons for the applications that were installed into the ‘Applications’ folder. This makes it pretty easy to deploy new machines as they only have to click an icon and they have the apps that they need.
If we had the money to do it right, I would have a Citrix farm and all dumb terminals to eliminate the desktop baloney.
We use LanDesk to push applications to all workstations after they are in place. It is also used for inventory purposes, along with serial numbers/stickers on each component.
With new users we use 4 or 5 different workstation configurations for any type of office use. Meaning, I have 4 or 5 DVD images to burn to any workstation if something goes wrong.
All data is either on an exchange server or in their Home Directories, and if it is local, it is gone if I take their workstation away.
LanDesk also works well as a remote desktop solution to work with end users from your office.
None of my users have access to the C:\ drive or to the CD-ROM drives on their machines. It makes things MUCH easier when swapping machines out because we don’t have to worry about any local data on the machines. All data is stored on the home directories or on the company shared drive.
Virtual Desktop…Virtual Servers…Its extremely cost effective to…honestly if you have a good handle of these technologies it will greatly help your career.
PCI in Buffalo has started to virtualize all of their remote servers for their customers in their two data centers as of 6 months ago.
Pretty impressed with it 2 identical servers, running 8 different servers and having the 2nd server redundant = 99.9999% up time.
Forget hardware failures or a single point of failure. Both buildings will have to burn down, or the whole state needs to lose power for a day for a customers server to go down.
I don’t even work there anymore, but what they are doing is impressive compared to other “We’ll host your website” outsourcing companies around WNY.
We replicate between Buffalo and LA with our virtual machines for hosting…I designed and put together everything here…
Xen Servers licensing model beats out VMWare…and every new release of Xen Server has a ton of new features I think Xen will take over the market a lot this next year…
Alright looks like we are going the right direction with what we had planned.
We already have a Citrix implementation with our regional offices. But we have been running Novell for the local office, its just really archaic and cumbersome. A couple of us have been working out a budget for building out a replacement for it. We have a few options on the table. The one I like the best is A combination of VMWare and Citrix XenDesktop.
We figure this will be the easiest way to manage upgrades, we can still use existing PCs and once the bulk of them are due for upgrades we can buy/lease thin clients to take care of the work after that. We figure this is the best transition into a virtual environment. 80% of our servers are already running on VMWare.
