2x

OK, as I wrote earlier today I went onto a research mission for today, looking at the alternatives for the 2x stuff. Looks like Citrix Presentation Server is just the software I’m looking for. Watched the demo’s on their website, which are quite impressing, but sadly don’t tell me everything I’d like to know. Maybe I’ll ask some people in Greifswald and in the vicinity, how stuff works with Citrix. Maybe I should even get in contact with Citrix itself and ask for a test version, or some other sort of demonstration.

As Mike wrote about his experiences with hardware vendors, I’m gonna devote this here post to my favorite software company in the world. We recently bought two copies of a software called " 2X Application Server Enterprise Edition". As one would think from reading the spe cs of the software, it’s near a Citrix solution (which it is, at least for a small part); but in return it’s faaaar away concerning the price. Just so you get an idea, about what I’m meaning with " faaar": 1 2 3 4 5 6 Windows Server 2003: Standard Edition: 2 * 91,00 CAL: 50 * 6,00 Terminal Server CAL: 50 * 17,00 ___________ 1.332,00 The above are fixed costs, you need them anyway as both Citrix as well as the 2X solution is only working * on top* of Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services. Now, here’s the real comparison between 2X Application Server & Loadbalancer and Citrix XenApp Platinum Edition: 1 2 2X 2 * 1510,00 = 3.020,00 Citrix 50 * 393,00 = 19.650,00 While 2X is licensed per terminal server, XenApp is licensed per user. As you can see from the above prices, the 2X solution is roughly 1/6 of the Citrix XenApp solution.

As I mentioned before, we decided against the Citrix Presentation Server solution in favour of the 2X LoadBalancer and ApplicationServer combination. You’re gonna say, but Citrix does the same and it’s only one " application frame". 2X is exactly the same.

As some of you know, the company I’m currently working for, recently acquired some thin clients to replace our old computers for the students to work on. Those PC’s are like P3 800 MHz with 512MB RAM and sadly don’t run Office 2007 anymore, so we replaced them with thin clients and are streaming those applications from a Windows Terminal Server cluster (created by and with 2X Application LoadBalancer). So far so good, getting them to display the applications ain’t hard, the real hard part starts when you want additional things from this Windows XPe (Embedded), like lets say getting them to display a German language. ...

We are still waiting for the money promised by the state and the country for our HBFG (again, it’s “Hochschulbauförderungsgesetz”), that hopefully is reducing or eliminating our storage/SAN problem we have currently. Right now we have to Cisco MDS9216 (that’s a 16-port 2GBps SAN-switch, two for redundancy), which means we only have 16 SAN-ports. That isn’t much, but still is to less, as we have like 30 machines or so, that really need access to the SAN, so we either end up unplugging some of them from the SAN or merge them onto some big machines (like our x366). ...

OK, so I’ve spent the last day working on my bosses $MAILPROGRAM. In detail, I’ve been trying to get his mails from Eudora (which really is complete crap) to Outlook (yeah, yeah I KNOW but he really needs a decent calendar with his E-Mail program, which neither KMail, nor Thunderbird nor Mozilla Suite - aka SeaMonkey can provide). Problem with all that is Eudora’s crappy way of saving mails (and their attachments). Eudora is saving the mails in regular MBX format, but is putting the attachments into a separate folder. I’ve looked all over the web, and only found one application capable of importing his mails into Outlook including the attachments from the Attach folder. ...