Customer Reviews

Inside Citrix® MetaFrame XP™: A System Administrator's Guide to Citrix MetaFrame XP/1.8™ and Windows® Terminal Services (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Great book on little known facts concerning MetaFrame that I could not find in other books out there. Great information on the Program Neighborhood Agent and NFuse. This book even talks about Extranet. A must for people who administer MetaFrame servers or consult on Citrix products. . .I use it as a reference guide.

First of all I'm surprised this outstanding book hasn't received more raving reviews. I can only say: this is a superb Citrix book.

The book is NOT a study guide, and as such should not be used to pass a Citrix exam. It's not at all detailed enough to fit that need. What need it does fit though is for the administrator who needs to get acquainted with Citrix technology, and have a broad but reasonably detailed overview of installation and migration Citrix concepts, possible mixed Citrix environment issues, and coverage of items he will run into everyday. If you fit this description, you will benefit from this book.

The book starts off with a good introduction of Citrix client behavior, Citrix and Windows architecture, thin client computing approaches and the like. Even though it's heavily MS oriented, even MCSE certified people will see this as a welcome refresher. This approach is a *whole* lot better than "The definitive guide to Citrix MetaFrame XP" E-book, which starts writing about pricing from page 2 or so, without any introduction into the thin client computing world.

Chapter 6 and 7 (70 pages in total) focus on the Citrix planning phase (where to put the zone data collector, which database product to pick, migration paths, machine scaling, physical drive layout suggestions etc.), which is very useful material for people involved in Citrix projects, managers as well as technicians.

Chapter 8 goes deeper into the actual installation of Citrix. From that moment on, a more or less modular approach is taken. You can freely skip chapters, since all are self-containing. Only very important things are repeated throughout the book (not copied, like Hipson's "Mastering the Windows 2000 Registry"). All necessary things a Citrix admin should know are then covered in a single chapter (TS user configuration options, Terminal Server connections, Deploying RDP and ICA clients, Security etc.).

Chapter 21, Performance tuning and Resource Management, is a gem. As many SQL administrators know, performance tuning can be hard. Many practical performance testing highlights and hints for performance increase are provided though that can be put into practise almost immediately. The tips that are given can be divided into three broad groups:
- known tuning methods (disable graphically intense screensavers, clean the Run registry key as much as possible)
- lesser-known tuning methods (disable Office background grammar checking, disable Dr. Watson logging)
- "unknown" tuning methods (disable paging out the Executive OS components)

In the meanwhile, references are given to third party tools and web sites, so users can delve further into certain practical and theoretical aspects of MS/ Citrix XP.

The author is short and consise when he needs to be (excellent top 10 lists about issues that are covered at the end of many chapters), and takes a more elaborate approach when necessary (such as when describing the loopback processing mode and possible licensing issues).

IMHO two things can be improved:
- More screenshots wouldn't have hurt. I had to write down the book's page number, and check out the setting at work the next day. This is not a big issue though.
- There are some annoying typos which could have been prevented easily (HKEY_KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE really should be spotted). This is also a minor issue.

All in all, this is a wonderful book. Technically accurate, easy to read, and serves as a good reference.

Very detailed information and easy to follow. This book was a great learning tool to help me pass my CCA. I highly recommend it for anyone in the field.

Excellent Step-by-step book for planning and installing Citrix Metaframe XP. I bought this and one other Citrix reference book when I needed to design and install a 3-server farm -- the other one ("Configuring Citrix Metaframe XP for Windows"; Broomes, Khnaser, Crump and Craft; Syngress; 2002) was useless. However, this book gave excellent structure to the entire process, almost like a good cookbook.

The first half of the book is about analysis, design, and installation. The second half is about fine-tuning and adding some of the more esoteric features that Citrix offers.

The 2002 edition that I have was written for Windows 2000 Server, but I found that it was easy to adjust to Windows Server 2003. There may be new editions for 2003 now, I am not sure.

The writing is clear and concise, with ample illustrations and screen shots. The author exhibits a dry and intelligent sense of humor that makes the book rather entertaining to read. Let's face it; it's not exactly the most entertaining material. But short chapters, with embedded checklists and summaries, make it easier to digest, without the distracting air of a "dummies" book.

Why only 4 stars when the book was so useful to me? The subtitle of the book is "A System Administrator's Guide to Citrix Metaframe XP/1.8 and Windows Terminal Services", and I simply don't consider it to be a good administrator's guide, in the traditional sense. There is a ton of good information in here, but it's not laid out in classic reference style; the structure is A) planning and installation, and B) fine-tuning. So in that sense, I consider it more of an installer's reference than an administrator's guide. But I should point out that the chapter on Citrix and Microsoft licensing is the best I've ever read, simply for explaining what you need to buy (tough combinations), when to activate it, and what happens when you don't, and why.

I hope this review helps you as much as this book helped me.

Book is interesting to read. Interesting facts and HOWTO's above citrix and terminal services