MPLS alternative
-
So in a way thinking about just Citrix, we would drop AD and move the devices to local users.
Then either create a "New Local AD" with the users credentials just for Citrix use?
Or use one of those 3rd party VPN things (AppGate)
We have 600+ devices out there, but only 300 odd need Citrix Access.This would make Citrix LANless/Zero Trust as the user will need to authorize them selves via the "Local AD" credentials or that AppGate thing?
-
Printing LANless / Zero Trust
I'll tackle that another day
-
@hobbit666 said in MPLS alternative:
So in a way thinking about just Citrix, we would drop AD and move the devices to local users.
Then either create a "New Local AD" with the users credentials just for Citrix use?
Or use one of those 3rd party VPN things (AppGate)
We have 600+ devices out there, but only 300 odd need Citrix Access.This would make Citrix LANless/Zero Trust as the user will need to authorize them selves via the "Local AD" credentials or that AppGate thing?
Exactly. And once LANless, there is no need for XenApp to sit on your LAN at all. You can move it to colo or cloud whenever you want. Ours is in colo and uses zero LAN resources.
-
@scottalanmiller said in MPLS alternative:
Exactly. And once LANless, there is no need for XenApp to sit on your LAN at all. You can move it to colo or cloud whenever you want. Ours is in colo and uses zero LAN resources.
When you say move XenApp that's our servers with the 15VMs into a Co-Lo hosts or spin up 15 VM's in AWS/AZure etc?
-
@hobbit666 said in MPLS alternative:
@scottalanmiller said in MPLS alternative:
Exactly. And once LANless, there is no need for XenApp to sit on your LAN at all. You can move it to colo or cloud whenever you want. Ours is in colo and uses zero LAN resources.
When you say move XenApp that's our servers with the 15VMs into a Co-Lo hosts or spin up 15 VM's in AWS/AZure etc?
Right, those would be the options. Obviously the colo approach is cheap and easy and going to AWS/Azure would require the gift of a firstborn child, but technically both work.
-
@scottalanmiller said in MPLS alternative:
going to AWS/Azure would require the gift of a firstborn child, but technically both work.
Yeah whenever i've looked at "Cloud" for VM's we run i've always just closed the browser tab.
-
but then this will beg the obvious question... what's the function of the XenApp farm? Most companies only do this to deal with LANbased assets. So that becomes more of the onion - one LANbased requirement on top of another.
We do it to provide a standard working environment with a standard IP address for all staff when needed, but it's a specialty thing, not where they work all the time. Ours remains LANless and there are good reasons to do that. But if you are LANless, you'd likely not want to use XenApp to do it.
-
@hobbit666 said in MPLS alternative:
@scottalanmiller said in MPLS alternative:
going to AWS/Azure would require the gift of a firstborn child, but technically both work.
Yeah whenever i've looked at "Cloud" for VM's we run i've always just closed the browser tab.
Well, I'd assume that that is for two reasons. One because you don't have elastic workloads, which is the sole intended purpose of cloud computing. And the second is because you seem to have a very legacy environment that would feel natural around 2001 (literally, all this stuff feels about twenty years old.). Lift and shift to cloud is a really bad idea, cloud isn't meant for that and those workloads aren't meant for cloud.
Going to cloud in any sensible way requires "starting over" and rethinking your infrastructure from the ground up. Every decision. Every app.
And even then, most smaller companies have no reason to be looking at cloud because even if they design absolutely everything around it, it still doesn't make sense for their workload patterns.
-
@scottalanmiller said in MPLS alternative:
but then this will beg the obvious question... what's the function of the XenApp farm? Most companies only do this to deal with LANbased assets. So that becomes more of the onion - one LANbased requirement on top of another.
@hobbit666 said in MPLS alternative:
We use MS Dynamics GP. So instead of installing this on 300+ computers (then having to update 300+ computers when updated keys and modules come out) we have 15 Citrix Xen Desktop servers that these computers access to get onto the GP stuff.
-
@scottalanmiller said in MPLS alternative:
@hobbit666 said in MPLS alternative:
@scottalanmiller said in MPLS alternative:
going to AWS/Azure would require the gift of a firstborn child, but technically both work.
Yeah whenever i've looked at "Cloud" for VM's we run i've always just closed the browser tab.
Well, I'd assume that that is for two reasons. One because you don't have elastic workloads, which is the sole intended purpose of cloud computing. And the second is because you seem to have a very legacy environment that would feel natural around 2001 (literally, all this stuff feels about twenty years old.). Lift and shift to cloud is a really bad idea, cloud isn't meant for that and those workloads aren't meant for cloud.
Going to cloud in any sensible way requires "starting over" and rethinking your infrastructure from the ground up. Every decision. Every app.
And even then, most smaller companies have no reason to be looking at cloud because even if they design absolutely everything around it, it still doesn't make sense for their workload patterns.
I.e. this isn't for Azure or AWS, but more for something like Vultr, or as already mentioned Colo
-
@scottalanmiller said in MPLS alternative:
... what's the function of the XenApp farm? Most companies only do this to deal with LANbased assets. So that becomes more of the onion - one LANbased requirement on top of another.
It hosts dynamics GP
We run it over Citrix as installing the "Fat" client on all the machines and then updating them when module updates/license updates come in. It's simpler to do this on 15 servers not 300 devices. also means only 15 machines are accessing SQL -
@Dashrender said in MPLS alternative:
@scottalanmiller said in MPLS alternative:
but then this will beg the obvious question... what's the function of the XenApp farm? Most companies only do this to deal with LANbased assets. So that becomes more of the onion - one LANbased requirement on top of another.
@hobbit666 said in MPLS alternative:
We use MS Dynamics GP. So instead of installing this on 300+ computers (then having to update 300+ computers when updated keys and modules come out) we have 15 Citrix Xen Desktop servers that these computers access to get onto the GP stuff.
MS Dynamics GP is such utter garbage. I'd rather support Quickbooks, and you all know how much I love Quickbooks.
-
@travisdh1 said in MPLS alternative:
@Dashrender said in MPLS alternative:
@scottalanmiller said in MPLS alternative:
but then this will beg the obvious question... what's the function of the XenApp farm? Most companies only do this to deal with LANbased assets. So that becomes more of the onion - one LANbased requirement on top of another.
@hobbit666 said in MPLS alternative:
We use MS Dynamics GP. So instead of installing this on 300+ computers (then having to update 300+ computers when updated keys and modules come out) we have 15 Citrix Xen Desktop servers that these computers access to get onto the GP stuff.
MS Dynamics GP is such utter garbage. I'd rather support Quickbooks, and you all know how much I love Quickbooks.
wow
-
@Dashrender said in MPLS alternative:
@scottalanmiller said in MPLS alternative:
but then this will beg the obvious question... what's the function of the XenApp farm? Most companies only do this to deal with LANbased assets. So that becomes more of the onion - one LANbased requirement on top of another.
@hobbit666 said in MPLS alternative:
We use MS Dynamics GP. So instead of installing this on 300+ computers (then having to update 300+ computers when updated keys and modules come out) we have 15 Citrix Xen Desktop servers that these computers access to get onto the GP stuff.
Ah, legacy client/server crap.
-
@Dashrender said in MPLS alternative:
@scottalanmiller said in MPLS alternative:
@hobbit666 said in MPLS alternative:
@scottalanmiller said in MPLS alternative:
going to AWS/Azure would require the gift of a firstborn child, but technically both work.
Yeah whenever i've looked at "Cloud" for VM's we run i've always just closed the browser tab.
Well, I'd assume that that is for two reasons. One because you don't have elastic workloads, which is the sole intended purpose of cloud computing. And the second is because you seem to have a very legacy environment that would feel natural around 2001 (literally, all this stuff feels about twenty years old.). Lift and shift to cloud is a really bad idea, cloud isn't meant for that and those workloads aren't meant for cloud.
Going to cloud in any sensible way requires "starting over" and rethinking your infrastructure from the ground up. Every decision. Every app.
And even then, most smaller companies have no reason to be looking at cloud because even if they design absolutely everything around it, it still doesn't make sense for their workload patterns.
I.e. this isn't for Azure or AWS, but more for something like Vultr, or as already mentioned Colo
I like Vultr a lot, but does nothing to improve the situation in this kind of case. It's still cloud.
-
@hobbit666 said in MPLS alternative:
@scottalanmiller said in MPLS alternative:
... what's the function of the XenApp farm? Most companies only do this to deal with LANbased assets. So that becomes more of the onion - one LANbased requirement on top of another.
It hosts dynamics GP
We run it over Citrix as installing the "Fat" client on all the machines and then updating them when module updates/license updates come in. It's simpler to do this on 15 servers not 300 devices. also means only 15 machines are accessing SQLYeah, that's the standard use case. To work around a non-business class legacy application that's not being maintained.
There is a Dynamics 365 current product that is cloud based, though. Should not need any of this if the app was updated. So this should be a temporary situation till it gets updated.
-
When you say your file less. Is using OD4B and the desktop apps of word/excel still classed as this? As I'm still using One Drive.
Or am I only truly getting to "file" less if everything is online? Like zoho or Google docs -
@hobbit666 said in MPLS alternative:
When you say your file less. Is using OD4B and the desktop apps of word/excel still classed as this? As I'm still using One Drive.
Or am I only truly getting to "file" less if everything is online? Like zoho or Google docsUsing OD or OD4B means you're using files.
Correct that Zoho/Google Docs or Microsoft Docs online are all fileless because they are stored in their vendors DB's, not as individual files.
-
@Dashrender said in MPLS alternative:
Basically if Hobbit is going to do this - he needs to get management to buy into a completely new paradigm of the design. which would be great, but a hard sell.
^^This 100%
-
@hobbit666 said in MPLS alternative:
When you say your file less. Is using OD4B and the desktop apps of word/excel still classed as this? As I'm still using One Drive.
That's "handling files in a more modern way", but it's still files. You are literally still accessing a file and dealing with file storage.
With what we do, there are literally no files anywhere in the process (till we send them to file-based organizations.) But even dealing with our partners, we are often able to remain fileless because of sharing mechanisms that we can leverage.
We have nothing like OneDrive because we don't have files to put in it (as mentioned we do HAVE NextCloud, but only a couple users use it at all and it's for special case large file items, mostly for marketing with big image files that we haven't gotten fileless yet.)
