dcarrion
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Terminal Server Farm...some advice
Hello
We are a company which is growing exponentially in the next year. My concern is that we should be buying server hardware which allows for growth. At the moment we are just buying custom built dual xeon machines with Windows 2003 server and setting them up individually as they come in. If you were a part company that was going to grow by 300 users in the next 12 months, what would you use to allow for that sort of growth in a terminal server environment? I am open to any suggestions such as blade, virtual machines, dual core xeon machines, anything and will give the points to the person with the most suitable solution. We are to stick to a core terminal server environment because of some of our software that we use.
Kind Regards
Daniel
We are a company which is growing exponentially in the next year. My concern is that we should be buying server hardware which allows for growth. At the moment we are just buying custom built dual xeon machines with Windows 2003 server and setting them up individually as they come in. If you were a part company that was going to grow by 300 users in the next 12 months, what would you use to allow for that sort of growth in a terminal server environment? I am open to any suggestions such as blade, virtual machines, dual core xeon machines, anything and will give the points to the person with the most suitable solution. We are to stick to a core terminal server environment because of some of our software that we use.
Kind Regards
Daniel
How many users do you currently have? My initial set up would be enough processing power where my initial need would be 50% of total capacity. When you get to 80% of capacity you start to make arrangements for new servers so that they will be in place by the time you reach 90% capacity. The new servers should put you back to the 50% capacity. This type of setup is easier to justify when you are rapidly growing.
The server spec would depend on what programs you are going to give your users if just basic office,internet, I have a dual 2.8 with 4GB of ram for 50 users in 4 offices without any problems and and at its max it runs at 50% (people doing adode docs) and its average is 27%. there are tricks to setting up a Terminal server IE work better on raid 1.
Also have a look at tscale this helps increase the numbers of users per server but dcarrion is right about the ram.
Also have a look at tscale this helps increase the numbers of users per server but dcarrion is right about the ram.
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I am thinking of 4-way processor machine with 16GB RAM and 2x 140~GB SATA attached SCSI with RAID 1 config. The base of this server would be 100 users hoping to stretch it to 110+. Am I pushing it?
Should be no problem read this doc it will point out some of the tweeks
http://www.dabcc.com/miab/MIAB4-Tweaks-Beta.pdf and look at this http://www.rtosoft.com/products/TScale/TScale.html
http://www.dabcc.com/miab/MIAB4-Tweaks-Beta.pdf and look at this http://www.rtosoft.com/products/TScale/TScale.html
Thanks. By the way, if you can I would go with blade servers. They are compact, you need less hardware (such as KVMs), and configuration is a snap.
If you are talking about servers with 4 proc and 8 GB RAM can handle about 40 - 50 users. I take it as 128MB per User. It works very fine for me.
If you are going to citrix then it would go to 100 users with the same config , b'coz citrix uses lesser memory than Terminal server.
Cheers!