Introduction

Planning the deployment of Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server 3.0 is a very in-depth process. Since Presentation Server and the underlying Terminal Services platform will be required in many deployments to integrate into nearly every process an organization may have, careful consideration and forethought must be given as to how best to introduce the technology. As with any major initiative undertaken in our current information technology shops, much thought is given on how to provide the greatest chance for success of new deployments that leverage as many features of the new products being introduced as possible, while reducing risk to the current environment and doing all this as inexpensively as possible. Careful planning is frequently the difference between a successful implementation and a failed deployment. Careful planning can be the difference between happy users and unhappy ones, as it can affect the performance of the overall network even if we are only conducting a project on one aspect of the network. This is a very serious issue.

In this chapter, we look at the various pre-installation tasks that must be considered in order to minimize risks to our deployment, while allowing for easy expansion and growth in the future. Our first topic in this chapter is hardware planning. Hardware planning is a very large process that includes everything from selecting a vendor to evaluating user session load on the various platforms we are testing. Next, we turn our attention to platform deployment options, allowing us to investigate exactly how we...