When we introduce potential customers to the commonIT Virtual Browser solution, one question keeps coming up: “can’t I do the same thing using TSE or Citrix ?”. From a technical point of view, it’s partially true; but Virtual Browser has important advantages over a home-made TSE/Citrix solution which I’ll discuss in this post. From a cost point of view, there is a huge difference between the two approaches, and I’ll talk about that in a follow-up posting.
Suppose you want to develop your own “Virtual Browser” based on TSE/Citrix; you’ll need to (short version):
- Install Windows Server 2008 (minimum version if you want to have the ‘RemoteApp’ feature that seamlessly integrates the remote window) and possibly Citrix Presentation Server on a server farm
- Configure the TSE/Citrix sessions (with local disk and printer sharing)
- Publish the “web browser” application (IE/Firefox)
You now have what we could call a “Virtual Browser lite” — but there are major differences compared with the commonIT Virtual Browser solution:
- No session isolation: This system won’t allow you to isolate sensitive web applications from others, which is on of the key features of the Virtual Browser solution
- You have to manage web browser security updates yourself, whereas commonIT can manage it for you
- You cannot choose different web browser engines (IE, Firefox, Chrome, …) for different web applications, a feature supported by the commonIT Virtual Browser solution
- If you want your users to print from the web browser, you’ll have to share local printers, which can take a long time during the session set-up; with “Virtual Browser”, you don’t have this problem because the technology used for printing doesn’t need the local printer to be shared
- The web browser published with TSE/Citrix is not the default web browser. This means the user will have to explicitly run this web browser which won’t be fired up when the user clicks on a URL (in their email client for example)
- Thanks to the virtualization technology used, it’s possible to run 3 to 4 more sessions on the same hardware when we compare Virtual Browser to a TSE/Citrix solution
So, technically speaking, there’s no reason to develop your own virtual browser solution based on TSE/Citrix — and the idea becomes even less interesting if we compare costs for the two approaches, as we’ll see in a second posting.
