Today i’ve installed a Terminal Server 2003 Environment with RES Powerfuse 2008. Some applications are not compatible for your Terminal Server environment, so there’s a nice solution for this applications, RES Workspace Extender.
RES Workspace Extender is a very usefull feature to enable applications not suitable for Server Based Computing (SBC) environments to integrate seamlessly into these environments anyway. You may already be familiar with the concept of Seamless Windows. This was an idea developed by Citrix back in the Metaframe days, to enable the client to spoof an remotely published app, running off a citrix box, to look like it was integrated into the local desktop. What the RES Workspace Extender does, is quite the opposite, hence the reverse reference: It makes a local application look like it’s part of a remote desktop, hence effectively turning a PC into a thin client with fat-client capabilities.
So let’s see the screenshots, so you can see the tool running in a live environment.
In my case the name of the terminal server is SRV-TRM01. As you can see, the application Winrar(for example, you can also use Windows Media Player or a CD/DVD burning application) is not installed on the terminal server. So let’s publish this application with RES Powerfuse using the tool RES Workspace Extender. I’ve installed a workstation called WS-XP01. I’ve installed the RES Workspace Extender and Winrar. You can see the RES Workspace Extender running in the system tray of the workstation.
The next step is to open the RES Powerfuse Management Console. Add a new application.
Make sure you enable the option Run as Workspace Extension (Yellow text). So let’s logon to the Terminal Server and as you can see there is our published application Winrar. When you start the application, and you take a look at the Windows Task Manager on the Terminal Server, you can see that there’s no proccess called winrar.exe, exactly that’s because the application is running local on your workstation!
The same for example Windows Media Player. As you can see, there’s no proccess called wmplayer.exe.
You can also see the difference between running Windows Media Player local or on the Terminal Server…so what is your choice?? 😀