I was introduced to Slashdot by some Open Source geeks years ago, and am grateful for it. I am especially grateful for the wide ranging, interesting articles that came to the pages of /. over the years. The chance to interact in a moderated forum has also been educational, as I believe some of the high ranking comments are often more informative than the original journalism or news piece. Thank you CmdrTaco for your hard work over the years.

Where I work, its called Flying Our Own Jets (FOOJ). No, we don't make airplanes.

I've been administering Citrix for many years, since it was Winframe 1.6 and was a modified version of NT 3.51.

Citrix just works. Another advantage is they support so many different client OS's. So, if you want to pay on the server side for Terminal Server CALs and Citrix Licenses, you get use a free OS, such as Linux and the Citrix client. If you already have Windows 2000 clients, you don't need to purchase TS CALS at all, its part of OS. Windows XP Pro also includes TS CALs.

List price for Citrix Metaframe Presentation server is $300 per concurrent user. You will also have to purchase Microsoft Terminal Server Client Access Licenses, which are less expensive, if I recall in the $10 per seat range.

I would be surprised that a library would have to pay full price for either the Windows or Citrix licenses.

As for server hardware, I was just at a Citrix user group where a Citrix SE claimed new dual AMD Operteron systems with 6 GB of RAM running Windows Server 2003 and Metaframe Presentation Server 3 could easily support 200 concurrent users. Last I checked, these boxes are not really that expensive in comparison to a room full of Dell boxes.

So, rough estimates of a dual HP Proliant DL145 with 2 Operteron 248 (2.2 Ghz) and 8 GB of RAM runs around $9000 with Windows Server 2003 installed.

The price of Citrix Software varies depending upon the number of concurrent users you expect, for example $9000 for 30 users at full list price.

The client works on quite junky computers, anything that can boot, has a good enough video card to display at 1024x768 or better, will run the Citrix client. They don't have to be fast, they just have to work.

--Peter