Citrix DaaS vs. Remote Desktop Services

DaaS is ideal in large-scale environments that require centralized, secure management. Remote workforces at large organizations. Highly regulated industries like finance. It allows for easy security and monitoring over one aspect instead of multiple remote machines. DaaS is not ideal for organizations with small budgets due to the pricing and organizations with lousy network connectivity. This would make the end-user experience terrible.

Incentivized

Remote Desktop Services provides access to work environments from any device. This allows us to ensure business continuity in case of disaster. It provides admins more control over access and security. Remote Desktop Services simplifies software updates and compliance management by reducing the need to act on end users devices.

• Enables remote access anywhere, to any device which eliminates managing the endpoints how traditional VPN would require.
• Integrates well with modern applications to offer optimized user experiences similar to native applications which increases user acceptance.
• Extremely flexible in how policies are applied to different use cases to ensure the appropriate security mitigations are in place with minimal effort.
• Easy to maintain and expand environments to fit business needs.

Incentivized

• When you connect with RDS, everything looks and feels (and is) exactly like you're sitting at that desktop. This is great for us and for users.
• You can sign in with RDS and the desktop will be the same as when you left it (if you choose to set it up that way).
• Although they take some setup, RemoteApps are a very handy way to let users access a program without requiring them to actually connect to a remote desktop on the server.

Incentivized

• A single console to manage the environment.
• The configuration is a bit complicated and we have hired Citrix administrators. But it's a good solution.
• User profiles need improvement. They could use more stability and more functionality as well as user profile redirection.

Incentivized

• Remote Desktop Services currently does not support multiple monitors on the terminal server. Unlike other applications such as Teamviewer, there's no feature to toggle between multiple screens even if they were connected to the terminal server.
• Remote Desktop Services should provide an option to scale up or down the screen size after a connection is established. Currently you can only adjust the screen size prior to a connection is established. So you'll have to take a best guess at what display screen resolution will fit best on your screen.
• Remote Desktop Services should offer some kind of menu to send special key strokes like Ctrl+Alt+Del to the terminal server. Currently the substitute for that particular combination is Ctrl+Alt+End. But I have yet to discover a replacement for other combination keystrokes such as Alt+PrintScrn.

Incentivized

Because it has been a mainstay of our business for many years.

Incentivized

Getting the environment setup took me three months of off and on work, with 3 complete rebuilds of the environment. Utilizing the WebUI to access the environment had presented so many random issues that we had to require end users to use the Citrix Reciever App. As it was the only stable solution. Aside from that, it hasn't required much admin intervention since the stand-up was completed.

Incentivized

The initial setup for Remote Desktop Services is complex, and licensing is costly. Each user connects to their virtual desktop hosted by a single server or group of servers, so a change or issue with servers quickly impacts every single user at the same time. Aside from that, users appreciate seeing their same personal desktop from any device or geographical location.

Incentivized

Xendesktop did a great job with HA of all the components.

Incentivized

The performance of XenDesktop is the best in the industry because of the fine-tuned protocol and years of updating. Overall, I don't think there is a better performer on the market. The question is if the added complexity of running XenDesktop is really worth the performance gain. While the latest version of XenDesktop is the easiest to deploy so far, it is still more challenging than the competitors.

Incentivized

There are some third party tools available that allow you to manage multiple connections.

Incentivized

The support is great when you get an engineer that knows what they are doing but getting that individual sometimes takes a while. Overall, they are professional and polite and competent in their knowledge. Sometimes the cases are open for an extended period of time which becomes very frustrating when dealing with critical issues.

Incentivized

As with any Microsoft Server product, support for Remote Desktop Services requires a paid support package. These are license-based and very costly, on top of the already costly product licensing. Microsoft's licensing is complicated to begin with, so setting up licensing alone essentially requires a licensing expert's counsel. There is community documentation and support available on Microsoft websites, as well as community websites.

Incentivized

I was self trained

Incentivized

Easy to understand and learn at my own pace

Incentivized

Take it slow and read the directions each step of the way. If you are not familiar with Citrix products, use a reseller or other experienced engineer to assist you in the setup of your environment

Incentivized

Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops is platform agnostic (we can use any underlying hypervisor technology) and really flexible for any use case. Using a golden image and provisioning it (with Machine Creation Services or Provisioning Services) is powerful and really straightforward, compared to the complexity in Microsoft RDS of maintaining a coherent farm, or the limitation of VMware Horizon to run on VMware Products.

Incentivized

We selected Remote Desktop Services based upon price alone. Other solutions on the market are significantly more expensive, but if your company can foot the bill you should seriously consider products that have been on the market for longer. The lack of an ability to easily upgrade farm servers has been a challenge for us - although it is still faster than updating an application on 2000+ machines. The lack of a centralized management console in 2008 R2 is also challenging, but you get by with the tools available to you. If you don't have the money to spend on Citrix or VMWare Horizon, Remote Desktop Services is a decent replacement.

Incentivized

Easily scalable

Incentivized

• XenApp has allowed us to continue support of legacy applications and all access of those applications to users across the globe with any device.
• XenApp can also manage software licenses by restricting number of users, number of concurrent sessions, or combination of both to required specification.
• While initial investment in XenApp can be costly, continuing support and upgrade are very cost effective and product stability is excellent.
• While there are competing products from Microsoft and VMware, when it comes to remote application access, XenApp is the best of breed.

Incentivized

• Allowed remote users access from home
• Shared file access for multipolar users from a centralized location
• Cost to add additional users when maxed out
• Purchase multiple licenses for programs to run in virtual machines. Or unable to run on a virtual machine

Incentivized