Terminal Services Question

I am trying to find out how much bandwidth we need for our employees. Right now we have a T1 but I have no idea how much bandwidth we are using and I need to plan for 300.

That depends on how much load they apply, ie: file transfer/running apps/ and so on...

Running apps shouldn't matter, they will be running with basic 56k settings.

Hi JoshDale,
The Packeteer Packetshaper is an extremely good tool for managing bandwidth.

Solarwinds has a whole package of tools designed for network management at www.solarwinds.net 

Costs vary depending on what you need but there is a trial version...

My firewalls do all my bandwidth monitoring needs, have you looked into that option?

Hope This helps

Yea, our firewall does that too for everything except vpn and that is why I can't calculate the amount of bandwidth used by remote users.

Hi,

If you use a router to connect to th outside world, you could use the MRTG. Itr checks the bandwidth usage. So if ou make sure that nothing else but the sessions is being tested, you should be good to go.

As Mattis said, it is about 20kbit to 30 kbit (if you use W2K it will be 30 to 40, with 2003 it will be 20 to 30). Also make sure that if you want to connect local drives and printers to the session, if they print a 10Mb file to their local printer, it will also go over the T1 line.

To be on the safe spot, if these users are all concurrent (normally they say about 80% of the concurrent users is a good way of counting) then you should use 240 (80% of 300) * 30 Kbit = 7200 Kbit, just for Terminal Services...

I`d say that rhandels math is a good way to calculate it..

If you can afford Citrix...that uses less bandwidth.

Even less than windows 2003

Hi JoshDale,

Yes, Citrix does use less than 2003. But that's Citrix problem at this point. The need for Citrix is becomming smaller and smaler because Microsoft made their TS services quite good in Server 2003. In 2000 TS kinda like sucks, because you cannot map local printer and drives to the terminal sessions..

Yea, my plan is to upgrade to windows 2003 within the year, but right now all I can afford to do is move our whole network to new servers.

Then, be aware of the fact that if you have W2K TS CAL's and you plan to go to W2K3, you will need to buy new CAL's.. So you can place it within the budget..

>>because you cannot map local printer and drives to the terminal sessions..
What? Strange.. I can...

Not with 2000...

Yup!

Yea, I do have a question though, if we migrate to 2003 do I have to buy all new TS CALS also?

Just a few things to throw in there...  According to the MS advertised bandwidth req's, 2000 TS uses 48k per session.  2003 uses 30k.  Citrix uses 16-20k.

And as for mapping local devices, with 2000 you can map pritners, but not drives (at least to the best of my knowledge)...


HTH,
exx

I don't think you can map local printers.

Oh and where did you get microsoft's advertised bandwidth. I have been crawling on their site all day trying to find it.

Hi,

>>Yea, I do have a question though, if we migrate to 2003 do I have to buy all new TS CALS also?<<

Yes you do need to.

And for the printers. They are indeed mappable on 2000, but a new session is set up for the printers. If you use the 2000 TS client, you wil need to create it manually (which is quite a hard thing to do..)
To the best of my knowledge it is not possible to connect a local drive using TS 2000 (hell, we even thought of buying Citrix just for that purpose)..

I just searched briefly for where I found this info, and didn't run across it immediately.  I found it when I did the TS rollout for my company about 3 years ago.

And that's fine, JoshDale, YOU can't map local printers, but ME and MY 1300 users all can.  Guess you must be doing something wrong.


-exx

Good for YOU