InformationWeek

September 28, 1998

Terminal Velocity For NT

Microsoft is diving into the thin-client market--but who will benefit? InformationWeek Labs tests Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Terminal Server Edition and Citrix's MetaFame to find the true cost of Windows terminal technology

By Logan Harbaugh

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he care and feeding of PCs can be expensive. PCs have a heavy administrative overhead requirement and are prone to failure in many work environments. So who needs them?

That was the tack taken by competitors to the Microsoft-Intel juggernaut as they tried to break the PC stranglehold on the desktop-computing market by attacking its hidden costs. Their answer was the network computer--the thin client was essentially a return to the centralized model of data terminals and mainframes, with a more graphical interface and some of the local processing capabilities of the PC.

Microsoft's response to this challenge is its Windows NT Server 4.0 Terminal Server Edition--the latest attempt to merge the worlds of PCs and mainframes. It turns a PC server into a multiuser system that lets thin clients run applications on the server, rather than needing the capacity to run them locally. In this respect, Windows terminals are more like X Windows and 3270 terminals than like their NC competitors--but the applications are standard Windows applications, rather than X Windows-, text-, or Java-based.

The first Windows NT-based terminal server to achieve popularity was Citrix's WinFrame, which was based on Windows NT 3.51. It's still in widespread use, although NT 3.51's limited support for recently released applications has been causing problems for administrators. Users have been pressing for a Windows NT 4.0-based version forsome time.

Windows Terminal Server is the NT 4.0-based terminal server those users have been waiting for. It provides access to NT 4.0 applications from a variety of clients, including terminals from a number of manufacturers and PCs capable of running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and later Windows versions.

Hurdles To Clear
However, there are at least four major hurdles on the upgrade path for Terminal Server Edition for organizations already using Citrix's WinFrame server. The first two are primarily issues of functionality; the remaining implementation issues are primarily financial.

First, administrators who have existing networks based on Citrix's Independent Computing Architecture will have to buy not just Terminal Server Edition, but Citrix's MetaFrame as well. Terminal Server Edition doesn't support the ICA protocol used by WinFrame for client connections--the only other option would be purchasing new clients for all users, unless the old client can support Microsoft's new Remote Desktop Protocol client.

The second functional issue is that Microsoft strongly recommends that a Terminal Server Edition server not be either a primary or secondary controller. For sites that have used Citrix in the past, this might pose some deployment problems for those running Citrix's NetWare Services to let users access NT domains from NetWare clients under Citrix. In that environment, the terminal server is required to be a primary or secondary domain controller. There are some workarounds to this issue, but they add to the upgrade-path headache.

A major cost hurdle on the upgrade track to Terminal Server Edition is its pricing structure. The users-per-server pricing model used by Citrix has been abandoned by Microsoft in favor of a per-user licensing model--which could produce a considerable cost increase if a company has a large number of part-time users. Terminal Server Edition also increases hardware requirements for both servers and clients, which might require upgrades to allow implementation.

This is especially significant on the client side if you implement Microsoft's new client software--while Citrix supports a 286 system running DOS or Windows 3.1, the minimum requirements for the 16-bit Terminal Server Edition client are a 386 processor or higher, 8 Mbytes of RAM, VGA or higher, and Windows for Workgroups. This is another area where administrators may opt for MetaFrame--the client requirements for MetaFrame on Terminal Server Edition are similar to the old requirements for WinFrame--a 286 with 4 Mbytes of RAM and DOS or Windows.