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I have a dilemma whereby many of my remote sites are workgroup machines that connect to Citrix in HQ. The remote sites now have a dedicated connection (varying bandwidth speeds) to the main HQ network. I'm weighing up the pros and cons of domain joining. From a visibility point of view for software and application licenses domain joining doesn't seem to really give me more visibility but I'm open to correction. It seems I still need a third party tool such as Symantec Altiris to control in bulk<br />
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Driving users out of Citrix and onto their local machine also introduces more admin overhead. I'm interested to get opinions from admins that have faced this decision. My end goal is to get better visibility on Windows versions, Office versions etc as there are a large amount of machines on the remote sites, thanks.
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I have a dilemma whereby many of my remote sites are workgroup machines that connect to Citrix in HQ. The remote sites now have a dedicated connection (varying bandwidth speeds) to the main HQ network. I'm weighing up the pros and cons of domain joining. From a visibility point of view for software and application licenses domain joining doesn't seem to really give me more visibility but I'm open to correction. It seems I still need a third party tool such as Symantec Altiris to control in bulk

Driving users out of Citrix and onto their local machine also introduces more admin overhead. I'm interested to get opinions from admins that have faced this decision. My end goal is to get better visibility on Windows versions, Office versions etc as there are a large amount of machines on the remote sites, thanks.

Domain join remote sites or not

Citrix is the synonym for the virtualization and application infrastructure systems developed by the company of the same name. Main areas are application virtualization, Software-As-A-Service (SaaS), cloud-computing and networking. The two most well-known are Citrix XenApp or Citrix CloudPlatform.

Citrix

Windows Server 2012 is the server version of Windows 8 and the successor to Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows Server 2012 is the first version of Windows Server to have no support for Itanium-based computers since Windows NT 4.0. Windows Server 2012, now in its second release (Windows Server 2012 Release 2) includes Foundation, Essentials, Standard and Datacenter, and does not support IA-32 or IA-64 processors.

Windows Server 2012

The Windows operating systems have distinct methodologies for designing and implementing networks, and have specific systems to accomplish various networking processes, such as Exchange for email, Sharepoint for shared files and programs, and IIS for delivery of web pages. Microsoft also produces server technologies for networked database use, security and virtualization.

Windows Networking

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical, globally distributed system responsible for associating the name of a computer, service or other resource into an IP address for connecting to the Internet or a private network. Most prominently, it translates domain names to the numerical IP addresses needed for the purpose of computer services and devices worldwide.