We've been a Citrix shop for a long time and are probably 90% thin, publishing desktops and all of our apps on those desktops. We have approximately 20 sites connected via MPLS or broadband VPN. The end users connect via ICA over those connections using thin clients.
The problem we're facing now is the need for multimedia streaming. Right now, we block it for users with Websense and open it for specific users on an as-needed basis. More and more people want/need it and I'm struggling to find a way to open streaming media to all users and still manage performance without spending a lot of money to do it. I'm worried that two users can fill an MPLS pipe by watching some HD flash video or something.
Thanks for any input,
Roger
We had the exact same dilemma, and setup redirection so that certain media types that were opened up within Citrix redirected back to the client for execution, and streamed off a local server in each office. This worked well although I'll admit there was an element of a "hack" to get it working.
We changed the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Citrix\SFTA\NoRedirectClasses reg key to exclude two protocols, which were going to be redirected, while everything else stayed within Citrix. We used "MMS" for WMV media and "PNM" for Flash media. I need to dig out all the details, as there were other settings I'm sure. We used Media Services on the servers that resided in each office, for the client <-> server streaming.
Going forward, we want to put media in the data centre though and ran from within Citrix. HDX MediaStream (SpeedScreen Multimedia Acceleraton) and HDX MediaStream for Flash will help with this tremendously.
I fear I've not even started to answer your question, but this is a big topic and I hope I've got the ball rolling.
Regards,Mark