Government Computer News
Citrix Streaming Client
GCN Lab Review: Citrix’s solution integrates well with the company’s overall architecture, but won’t work if you don’t already have the Citrix platform
Virtualized desktop PCs have been the bread and butter of Citrix’s business for a long time as a companion or alternative to Microsoft’s Terminal Server.
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Many organizations use the Citrix ICA (Independent Computing Architecture) solution to provide secure remote access to corporate applications and data. That works great as long as you have a connection to the corporate network.
Application virtualization is in many ways the next logical step to delivering remote access to a mobile workforce.
A local caching mechanism adds the capability to run applications even when you’re not connected.
It also makes it possible to automatically choose how to run an application depending on a number of factors, including network access and location.
The new addition to the Citrix client is called the Streaming Client. This local client interacts with the Citrix Presentation Server to access published resources.
The advantage to the streaming approach comes primarily from a deployment and maintenance perspective. Each virtual or streamed application only has to be deployed once. Upgrading or patching the application requires only one instance. The Streaming Client also provides application isolation in a similar manner to the solutions from other vendors.
Building a virtual application from a Citrix perspective consists of the same basic steps of creating a baseline profile, running the application installation program and then running an application profiler to save the appropriate files and configuration settings.
Citrix also makes it possible to install multiple programs into a single profile, such as the entire Microsoft Office suite. Once completed, the resulting profile is then published to a network share, accessible to any user.
Citrix uses a default set of rules for isolating streamed applications, which makes the underlying system virtually untouchable. When an application requests access to a system resource, such as the registry it creates, a per-user version is required. You can tweak the isolation rules for things such as the registry entries in Microsoft Office to keep from creating separate versions for every user, which typically isn’t necessary.
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