Installation guide

22 Implementing Windows Terminal Server and Citrix MetaFrame on IBM ^ xSeries Servers
users at a remote office. These users were connected to the MetaFrame server over a
128 Kbps Committed Information Rate (CIR) frame-relay link.
Figure 3-2 Example pilot bandwidth results
This pilot determined that the average bandwidth requirements were 5 Kbps. Therefore, the
bandwidth requirement for 10 users is 50 Kbps. Given the link had a CIR of 128 Kbps, no link
upgrade is required to support these remote Citrix users across the WAN. You can see from
the graph in Figure 3-2 that the total bandwidth required for ICA traffic “bursts” by nature, as
users type on their keyboard, move their mouse, and print to locally attached printers via
Citrix.
Citrix recommends that, for optimal performance in an active ICA session, 20 Kbps of
bandwidth must be available for each session before the bandwidth becomes a constraint.
Bandwidth usage can vary during a session depending on session activity. Latency of 1000
ms or more is likely to be unacceptable.
In practical environments, we found that 20 Kbps per each Citrix user provides excellent
performance. For more information on ICA bandwidth requirements, refer to the Citrix online
forum and search on the keyword “bandwidth”:
http://support.citrix.com/
You can install such hardware devices as Packeteer Packetshaper and NetReality WiseWan
between a site’s router and LAN. The devices can provide a breakdown of the bandwidth and
response times. They can also provide additional information in sizing your wide area network
(WAN) links for MetaFrame. You should seriously consider these devices for enterprise
thin-client solutions to provide quality of service (QoS).