Terminal Servers in clustered environment - physical or virtual?

You will be able to have more concurrent users per physical server, and hence less servers required in your cluster, compared to a virtual cluster.

In a virtual cluster (because of the Hypervisor), you will require more virtual servers for the same load, if you have no issues with licensing, resources, then this is not an issue.

other than that the same virtual versus physical arguments apply, reduced support costs, reduced electricity, air con, reduced networking etc

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hanccocka:
Thanks for the analysis in terms of hardware infrastructure.

What about in terms of deployment/piloting/failover options?   Scenarios such as:

host computer dies/have to replace it - replacing a physical TS versus a virtualized TS

want to add more resources - deployment of new 'physical' systems vs deployment of 'virtualized' systems

pilot system/upgrades - you want to modify the existing Terminal Server configuration but don't want to roll it out to all the TS's at once in case there's a bug that only shows up after 'production' testing that never showed up in 'test' testing

rollback in the above scenario and in the scenario where somehow all the TS's were updated based on a 'successful' pilot but then it turned out that a problem shows up later and all the TS's have to be reverted

VM failover  -


Also in 2012 is there not an option in a cluster where hardware failure on a host that is running various VM's for the VM's to live migrate upon hardware failure?

Thanks for the insights.