Some of my customers run our Clarion business applications with TSplus on their own cloud vps with Windows Server or on a personal local pc inhouse with TSplus with Windows 10 Pro or Windows 11 Pro. This runs very well, but they always need an administrator for updating TSplus, Windows updates…
I have read something about Azure Virtual Desktop. With AVD it’s also possible to run my Clarion applications on Microsoft servers? I don’t know much about AVD at the moment.
Do you have some experience with AVD? What are the costs? Is it easier to setup than TSplus?
I signed up for Azure. Oh my, this is way too complicated for me to use. I don’t know how all the pricing will be. I’m going to pass on trying to figure it out.
With my TSplus server, I just asked for a Windows Server, with 16 GB RAM and a 1 TB drive with RAID1 (mirroring). This is a $200 monthly cost with no upfront cost.
Then I bought TSplus MobileWeb Edition for unlimited users. This is a one-time cost.
That’s it.
All I have to know is Windows administration.
Relatively easy to understand. If you have the inclination and time you can install your own Windows 10 device (BYO licence). You’re responsible for updates though.
HI everyone,
I have a reason to consider going to SQL and the cloud for my Net talk Web app. I did a lot of asking questions.
So far the bottom line is:
MS SQL or PostGresql as they will replicate. The recommendation is to use MSSQL on Azure because once you set it up, the admins who use Azure say “it just works” and keeps running. Apparently you can do the same with PostGresql on Azure but it is a little more work ( and the SQL database is free). Reecommendation: Have one instance of the SQL database and have it replicate to another physical site. Unless you have a HUGE HUGE customer base…
If you want an app that scales, then use Azure. There are “azure engineers” who create something akin to “profiles” for bussinesses/users on Azure. The skinny is “if you have an application that is running lets say retail hours 7:00 Am to 10:00 PM and also has web users, then you have a certain base of Azure instances across the country to which your users connect to your app and talk to the SQL server. Now, when businesses open up at 9:30 AM to 11:00 AM you can spin up multiple instances so that there is no bottleneck and then wind them down toward 11:00 AM. Again, you can spin up multiple instances between 5:00 PM and 11:00 PM again, to handle the folks closing their establishment software. Tricky thing is that you can program Azure to do this and be responsive on a minute by minute basis - spinning up and shutting down instances that your users connect to.” I think that this is why pricing gets so quirky. You can roll the instances across the time zones as the day goes on. You can set up the profile so that none of the extra instances get started on holidays and maybe on Sundays. My takeaway is if you want to have a really responsive app you can get an azure engineer to tailor make usage profiles for your app. I haven’t looked into this yet but I have one of these azure engineers that I am going to track down in the near future and try to get more info.
Ron
As for scaling your app quickly - yes you can do that and in my opinion it’s the main benefit of using cloud, would that be Azure, AWS, Google or any other cloud provider. The problem is that you app needs to support working in load balanced multi server architecture. Not sure if you can run Clarion app on remote desktop like this. Unless there is something new I’m not aware of your clients connect to a specific RDP session and run your Clarion aplication on a specific server. If you decide to kill some of your instances your users using these will get disconnected possibly in the middle of doing something in your app. Of course they can log in again but they may loose some of their work and get upset. It may be different with NetTalk web app, don’t have much experience with these. If they can store their session data in the database so that killing a server running it won’t remove it and another server can seamlessly take over then fine, otherwise you end up with the same issue scaling your solution down in less busy times.
The other thing is that it only makes sense with milions of users. If you need to support 50 - 100 users running your Clarion application you should be fine with a VPS at any ISP site or self hosted machine. It’s also not true that Azure does not require administrator - it does. It’s just a bit different than administering on site Windows Server.
From my own experience Azure is really expensive in comparison to running VPS’es using other smaller IPS’s or hosting stuff in house. That of course may be different for large companies that can negotiate their prices and need to scale quickly when they launch a big sale and all of the sudden they get a few milion customers buying their discounted product.
If you are not working on that scale you would probably spend more money on Azure enginneers to set it up than you would save on not using some of these instances overnight or over weekend.
My clients (and my own server) run the Mobile Edition of TS Plus - big advantage because you don’t have to open up the RDP port to the outside world.
You can also configure it to only allow access to your Application in the published applications settings.
It’s actually a well written product and their support is excellent.
A great interim solution if you’re developing an Anyscreen version of your desktop application or if you want to stay with a desktop application.
Of course the greater the number of users the more “grunt” the server (whether Virtual or Physical) will need. My own experience is that the Xeon processor seems to handle multi user systems better than say the i7/i9 processors. The more RAM the better and NVME SSD gives great performance.
I’m not too sure how well TS Plus scales once you get beyond the 25 user range (Perfomance will also depend on what apps you allow the users to run as well).
The TS Plus enterprise edition does have a “Farm Manager” but I have no experience with it.
I’ve run TS Plus on Winows 7/10 and 11 also on Windows server2012r2/2016/2019 and 2022 - I haven’t run it Server 2025 yet.