At my company, one of the Citrix admins said it costs $7000 per server, which allows for about 15 concurrent users. More licenses can be added (for $), but she said it doesn't scale well past 15, so if we need to support more than 15, we put up another box. Not sure how many CPUs or memory is in each said box. For preserving access to Windows apps, I'm more inclined to go with Netraverse's Win4Lin Standard Server Edition (NSSE). Netraverse says it will handle about 13 users per CPU (so if you have a quad-cpu box you can support 52 simultaneous users), and costs $2300 for 25 concurrent users. Plus, you need to have the Windows 95/98 licenses, but since most major vendors won't sell you a box without a copy of Windows, the workstation covers that requirement. Netraverse also makes a Tarantella-based client that can be used on Windows clients thats $179 per seat. (With Citrix, the client software is free, regardless of platform.) 25 seat @ $179 is about $4500. Add that to the $2300 NSSE server, and for $6800 you have a system that can support 25 users instead of a $7000 system that only supports 15 users. But the hardware costs may even that out a bit, not sure. However, if you can have linux/x-terminal clients, then you don't need the Tarantella client and the associated costs. At my company, we're going to a new billing app next year that everyone will access using a Citrix client. I'm trying to use that opening to suggest that we carry the idea to its logical conclusion, and run x-terminals on the users' desks which then connect to servers running each app, much like what Largo, FL does. The hard part is that our Intranet uses NTLM authentication which means it only works with IE; and most users think email was invented with Outlook, and using anything different is too scary. Interestingly, in looking for ways to overcome these hurdles, I discovered that M$ makes versions of Outlook Express and IE for Unix, specifically for HP-UX and Solaris. (Here comes the punchline...) Man, they are worthless pieces of software. They're both buggy as hell, crash frequently, and would get you a failing grade in any programming class. And it's clear MS doesn't understand the 'unix way' of installation (of course, we knew that!). To top it off, neither seems to have any concept of how X windows works; I could never get either to run on one machine and display on another. Cynics might argue that these are just MS's attempts to "show that Unix doesn't work as well as Windows", but what it suggests to me is that they have a lot of not-very-bright programmers. Petre Scheie >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< On 11/7/01, 9:25:16 AM, Amy Tanner <amy at real-time.com> wrote regarding Re: [TCLUG] linux VAR in Twin Cities: > On Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 09:30:08PM -0600, Andy Zbikowski (Zibby) (zibby+tclug at ringworld.org) wrote: > > On Tue, 6 Nov 2001, Amy Tanner wrote: > > > > > Might be easier/cheaper to just run VMWare for any apps like that. Could > > > put the data on a linux samba box. But, you'd still have to pay for > > > VMWare,Windows, and ACT. > > > <snip> > > Unless everyone is admining their own boxen, Citrix seems like a better > > soultion...but that's just me. :) > what does citrix cost these days? > -- > Amy Tanner > amy at real-time.com > _______________________________________________ > Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > http://www.mn-linux.org > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list