Remote office - citrix Xenapp?Desktop? other options

[miguel.tinajero]

We are in the planning stages of setting up an office in Pittsburgh (Headquarters is Gardena, CA) that will have a couple of designers/draftsmen. I would really like for HQ to be able to assist Pitt on projects and vice versa. Currently, our Project Managers, when working remotely attempt to access regular files (word, excel, pdfs, etc) via VPN tunnel which is so slow they usually give up. So I'm sure this is not the best MO for cad files.

Last year an outside IT firm pitched a Citrix set up to us, but remote CAD was not in the plan at the time.

I'm know I'm not the first to attempt this, so I'd like to know how you all out there are set up, what problems you've experienced, what you think the best way to do this is.

Thanks, Miguel

[Brian Myers]

Have you seen Riverbed Steelhead? Might be worth a look...

http://www.riverbed.com/products/appliances/

[miguel.tinajero]

Brian,

That's the second time the name Riverbed has come up in my search. I'll definitely take a look.

Thank you,

Miguel

[UKITManager]

I would look at the Riverbedsteel head product but beware they have have many technical problems with AutoCAD files (if my memory is correct it was AEC files) that would not "compress" for the file transfer.

I have used a different solution with a Linux based VPN (which was fast) and a product called SureSync which preformed round-trip synchronization of specific folders at an delta block level. Only the parts of the file that had changed would be sent down the VPN pipe. You can add on a module for file-locking so if a member of staff has the drawing open in London; the Manchester office would see the file is "open". This prevented two copies being edited at the same time.

My suggestion would be to separate the data from the London office to ease the management of what is synced and what is not. So an extra drive letter T:\\ for trans-Atlantic files to your normal drive share. When I created our VPN to Manchester I used the same ISP (Viatel) for both SDLS lines at both sites to create a VPN over their subnet which simplified troubleshooting, support and increased speeds: our typical transfer rates were: 54ms to 78ms on a 2meg DSL line.

I hope this helps!

BTW: My wife's firm uses XenappDesktop and for most apps it is very fast. I have heard of office using AutoCAD 14 on Xenapps with great success. Contact me for a name of a firm that provides this service for UK and USA firms: they are located in Wimbledon and have 24/7 support.

[RobertB]

... beware they have have many technical problems with AutoCAD files (if my memory is correct it was AEC files) that would not "compress" for the file transfer.This issue was supposed to be resolved with the 2010 DWG file format. Note that I have not tested this.

[gwingate]

This issue was supposed to be resolved with the 2010 DWG file format. Note that I have not tested this.

This was resolved. It had to do with the fact that starting with ACAD 2007, when you changed even one line in a dwg file, the program essentially changed the entire file. One of the main ways that the Steelhead accelerates access is by only sending the deltas in the file. Since the whole file changed, the whole file had to be resent and you lost most of the benefit of WAN acceleration.

There is a patch and a couple of registry changes that will fix 2007-2009, and Autodesk made the changes permanent in 2010.

As far as XenDesktop for AutoCAD goes, if you have a VMware environment already you will get better pricing, performance, and lower admin costs going with VMware View. Version 4 came out in 12/09 and it is a lot faster and higher resolution than XenApp or Terminal Services sessions. v4.5 is due out very soon and has even more enhancements.

For Revit you should look at blade workstations with graphics accelerators for your remote users for the best performance. Teradici has an awesome accelerator if you have international remote users that need to work in Revit.

[rkmcswain]

Brian,

That's the second time the name Riverbed has come up in my search. I'll definitely take a look.

Thank you,

Miguel

Just a note:
We have Riverbeds, and work in AutoCAD, Land Desktop, and Civil 3D over the WAN daily and have no problems.

[cjthompson85424]

Hi Everyone,

Longtime lurker, first time poster.

We’re a multi-office AE company that has had one problem or another since consolidating our individual servers into one central server. The most major problem was of course, slowness/latency. Our first attempt to correct this was the implementation of Riverbed devices. Our current typical setup for a satellite office is Desktop-Cisco Switch-Riverbed-Cisco Router-3mbps pipe-Cisco Router-Riverbed-Cisco Switch-Server. Our computers are mostly Win7 x64, 8GB ram, ATI Firepro V5800 video cards.

This unfortunately did not solve our problems for our cad applications. We are currently using ACA10, AMEP10, C3D10 and Revit10. The problem only occurs in the applications where we use Project Navigator (ACA and AMEP). The others are fine. In fact, if we circumvent PN and simply access DWGs the old-fashioned way, they open up and save lighting quick. With PN, it’s a bit of a gamble and can take 15-20 mins to open a sheet. I’ve also tested ACA11…same issue and results.

After exhaustive research and troubleshooting the drawings, software, hardware and network connections (with no luck), we’ve decided to try out various RDP software. It seems that drawings will open/save with LAN-like speed, but now we have an issue where the mouse is so jumpy that it makes it too difficult for our remote users to do anything with their DWGs.

So, does anyone have any idea of what we may be missing? Are the issues related? We’ve been through everything with a few gold-tier reseller/support teams along with network and riverbed specialists and no one seems to be able to pinpoint the cause(s).

Anyone run into this while implementing a Central Server-Riverbed network?

Thanks in advance.

- Chris

[cadtag]

bear in mind that acad is not supported in a remote desktop type scenario, and doing so probably violated the license agreement.

Map3D does have a license/support situation that would allow that, but AFAIK, other than that, you're out on a limb and the software police have the saw

[cjthompson85424]

The eulas allow for this type of access (2.2.3 Network Version + 3.1.2 Use Away from Usual Work Location).

We don't have Map3D. Was that simply mentioned as an example?

Our licensing is fine...we just need either figure out our a) network issue or b) rdp display issue.

Thanks,

- Chris

[cadtag]

Map3d was mentioned because it's the only version officially supported in a terminal services / remote desktop configuration.