Citrix Provisioning Server

Terminal Server or Terminal Services have been and still are among the most neuralgic elements of a modern IT because they are the key to delivering applications and data to users based on the client/server architecture.

And yet the phrase “Terminal Server” is a two-edged sword: on the one hand, there is the server which is responsible for providing resources.  Ever since people started speaking of Green IT and virtualisation the main focus of attention has been directed to server optimisation and reliability.  However, on the other hand, there is the terminal which barely lives up to its name, i.e.  it is no longer used in the original sense of the word.  Instead, a typical terminal has become what we call 'fat client' — a mature personal computer used by almost every employee, disregarding his or her respective needs and requirements.  This does not only waste most of the computational power during usual terminal server sessions, such a computer also demands individual and thus time-consuming maintenance.  Apart from that, personal computers get outdated fairly quickly and therefore have to be upgraded or even replaced too often.  Hence, the vicious circle looks as follows:

Is it not time we remembered the actual sense of the word “terminal” and considered it just a shell, a container if you want, to breathe new life into, on demand, again and again? At this point you could probably say, what a biblical imagery: an almighty administrator resides in his heavenly data centre — in fact, Citrix speaks of “Cloud Computing” in this context — giving soul to his devout lambs, literally at the push of a button.  However, this is the exact principle behind what Citrix calls the Provisioning Server:

Based on this methodology just a single image of an operating system (or a few of them at most) has to be prepared and maintained on a stand-alone (and ideally highly available) storage system, such as SAN or NAS for instance.  Henceforth, this image can be distributed to some client device, i.e. a terminal, with the help of Citrix’ streaming technology.  Streaming allows using endpoints for example with no hard disks:

As a matter of fact, whatever helps terminals should also work for servers, too.  That is why the Provisioning Server has got different versions: one for data centres and another one for the client side.

So, if you do not want to simply dispose of your supposedly outdated hardware, but you if you want to optimise your terminal services instead, we suggest that you come and see us — or even better: we come and see you to work out and implement a reliable plan.