And this is Terminal Services vs. VNC, written , and concerning Uncategorized
Joel discusses Terminal Services vs. VNC, and comes down firmly on the side of Terminal Services, with his only major disappointment being that the server has to be a Windows box. However, he's completely left out the issues of cost and licensing. Now, I appreciate that if you need some software and it's for-money rather than for-free then you pay for it, out there in the Real World. However, we use VNC at work -- we're not a TS shop, the alternative was Symantec's PCAnywhere until I pointed out VNC to people -- and, even ignoring that the zero cost of VNC makes it easy to put a VNC server on every desktop machine and make the helpdesk's life a lot easier (which is orthogonal to what Joel was talking about, in that I think he's talking about server administration), with VNC you don't have to worry about licences. Even if TS CALs were free, which they're not, you'd still have to ensure that everyone who needs one has one, every time you get a new member of the support team they get new CALs for each of the servers you admin, etc etc. And all those CALs mount up when each one costs you money. Especially since Microsoft's recent licensing ploy for TS seems to be that even if you're not using an MS client you still have to have a CAL, so something like the rdesktop client which has a reimplementation of the TS protocol for Linux still has to have the appropriate licence. With all that in the way, I say that the limitations of VNC aren't really that severe, especially since Joel's number 2 big reason (that VNC doesn't transmit shift+arrow keypresses) doesn't seem to apply for me -- maybe he's using an older version or something?
In my experience, Citrix's MetaFrame is an equivalent of TS (well, TS is MetaFrame -- iirc, MS bought the Citrix code and rolled it into Windows proper, although that might just be my faulty memory) and has a more favourable licensing policy. YMMV, mind.
Comments
mike
kevinf
VNC is not a thin client. To compare it to terminal services is to compare apples to golf balls. VNC is simply a support tool and that is it…it is a screen scraper. While, terminal services and citrix are thin clients, designed to connect and run applications on the server side. For example.. try connecting with multiple sessions to a server with VNC. It doesn’t work! It’s not designed to. TServices is not a screen scraper, it uses the same tecknology that allows you ro run mini apps over the net.
sil
kevinf: multiple separate VNC sessions to one server certainly does work, if you’re talking to a Unix server. Windows, on the other hand, doesn’t know how to have more than one graphical user unless you purchase the extra Terminal Services stuff. More to the point, Joel wasn’t talking about using TS clients as thin clients to run multiple sessions on one Terminal Server, he was talking about using TS to remotely administer a Windows box, which is exactly what VNC is for.
phil
So the point we can all agree on is that depending on what you want, you use a different tool. You dont use a hammer to cut wood, so you dont use VNC as a multi session thin client on windows - but you do use it grab the interactive console session remotely for admin work.
Its not something you can really compare as they are designed for different purposes.
Having said that, if you get your CALs free through an MS partnership or whatever, TS beats VNC hands down for both admin of the console session and multiple sessions - and if you are an MS partner you're not going to mind the one platform limitation!
sil
phil: I agree with you. The point I was trying to make was not that people are trying to contort VNC into doing what Terminal Services does (although some are), it's that some people are using TS for doing stuff that they could have easily done with VNC, and paying for the privilege. If you get the CALs free and you don't care about multi-platform then I see no problem with TS, given that you've already bought into the Windows concept anyway.
Algot Runebjörk
> sil said,
>
> June 28, 2005 at 7:17 pm
>
> kevinf: multiple separate VNC sessions to one server certainly
> does work, if you’re talking to a Unix server.
But why would anyone want to run VNC on a Unix server?
X work very well, and there are lots of good X-servers for Windows out there, which will allow you to use xdm and whatever needed to log on directly. Why go over VNC when there is a perfectly good native solution that's been around since X was created?
/ Algot
Aquarion
VNC (esspecially vncx11) allows you to take over an existing session, the problem with remote X as a admin solution is that you can't just log into the box, do what needs to be done and log out again, you have to have it sitting there all the time.
Frederic
The advantage of running VNC across all your servers, windows and linux, is simply this - one client for everything.
remote desktop rules!