To: Prognosticator who wrote (19478 ) 9/8/1999 2:12:00 PM From: Mitch Blevins Read Replies (3) | Respond to
Although it appears to be just another incarnation of the X-Terminal, there are some differences. I don't have any experience with these things, but am just repeating snippets I've picked up over the Net...(1) You can connect to application servers that run different wire protocols. If you want to use RDP to get Windows applications, this is translated by the Terminal Server to the protocol used by the SunRay. You can then seamlessly run RDP, ICA, X, etc from one machine, without needing knowledge of these protocols on the client. Upgrading to support new protocols only involves an upgrade of the Terminal Server, not every client machine.(2) Authentication is centralized. With an X-Term, you must authenticate with each Server you connect to. This can be automated somewhat with NIS, but it is still far from seamless. With SunRay, the mappings from native SunRay authentication to the various authentication schemes of each App Server can be stored and managed from a central place.(3) User preferences are centralized. The same authentication advantages also apply to user-defined preferences.(4) Easier resource planning. Running the Terminal Server on the same machine as the application makes it difficult to plan the required amount of hardware resources for a given amount of users. Since the resources are shared, an increase in memory usage by an application can adversely affect all users connected to that server. SunRay solves this by having the applications run on a separate machine from the one that is pushing pixels to the user, so an overworked application server will not affect the basic operations for all users connected. Likewise, adding more applications will not likely increase the hardware requirements for the Terminal Servers or the network connections from TS to SunRay.
