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Paul BarrettFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Terminal Services Server Sizing

I intend to deploy a terminal server for 20 concurrent users.  At this moment in time I am not concerned about the bandwidth coming into the server for the remote users, as this is a separate questions.

This server will be Windows Sever 2008 R2 64 Bit, 8 Gigabyte RAM, dual-core Xeon 1.86GHz CPU.  SQL Server Express 2008 R2 64 bit will be running and users will be given MS Word and Excel (No Outlook).  A Microsoft Office 2010 Access front end database will be given to each user, which connects via an ODBC connection to the SQL Server database, in which there will be a contact database with about 10,000 records.

Would this server spec be OK to serve these 20 concurrent users?, and is there an easily understandable set of benchmark calculations that can be used, or a tool somewhere?

Thanks
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Avatar of Darius Ghassem
You need to make sure you have enough bandwidth as well make sure you team network cards together to get more bandwidth you need to have at least a quad core processor.
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Thanks for comments so far.  You say:

1.  Each terminal session consumes around 128 Mb
2.  With Word, Excel etc. add another 300

This is exactly the sort of answer I am looking for, but where is this documented?
Not documented this is why it is hard for someone to recommend the exact configuration for a TS server. Usually this is a best effort configuration recommendation
IN simple words, when building a TS - Install as much CPU and RAM in the Host as your budget allows, without overkill. If you have more RAM available, the sessions will use it. If you have less RAM, the sessions will suffer.
Thanks all for your comments, always a tricky one to award points when multiple people have had a positive impact. 125 points to people who pointed me in the direction of some good material.  250 points for the person who put some figures on it.  Having done a lot of research, a good rule of thumb for  MS-Office users on a ts is to have 450 MB per user if there are 20 or more as there will always be periods of non activity from some, allowing spiky RAM grabs from others going unoticed.  Putting on SQL Server Express 2008 R2 64 bit means it will not grab more than 1 Gbyte RAM, and I allowed 2 Gbyte for OS use and services, leaving 5 Gbyte for users, currently 250 MByte RAM each if all 20 users are on.  Have managed to get 12 Gbyte RAM, so approx 450 MByte RAM per user.
Cannot do anything about processor, but again SQL Server Express can only see one processor, and I have my own sql server express back up utility.  Well that's my plan anyway.  Thanks all