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Hello All,<br />
We are ordering new servers for our Terminal Server farm. I have some questions and would like some advice.<br />
<br />
We will be keeping these servers in our colo and while I wanted to try and get 4 physical servers I may need to consolidate them down to two beefier servers due to rack space. These two servers I have configured with:<br />
<br />
2 Intel Xeon 2450 2.10Ghz 8 core<br />
128GB RAM<br />
6 x 600GB 15K HDDs (thinking of RAID10)<br />
<br />
My questions are:<br />
Should i leave these two servers AS-IS or should i install VMWare or Hyper-V to split these two into maybe 4 VM's (two on each server)?<br />
<br />
We have 105 people who will be using the servers with perhaps 15% growth this year. They run very heavy excel macros. I've seen some excel sheets taking 400MB+, and each user could have several open at a time.<br />
<br />
I'm not sure if any whitepapers exist that will explain performance, amount of users, etc. We have current servers in a farm to help load balance. However, they are reaching a limit on resources with the current servers. <br />
<br />
I need to be able to get as much performance as possible with these servers.
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Hello All,
We are ordering new servers for our Terminal Server farm. I have some questions and would like some advice.

We will be keeping these servers in our colo and while I wanted to try and get 4 physical servers I may need to consolidate them down to two beefier servers due to rack space. These two servers I have configured with:

2 Intel Xeon 2450 2.10Ghz 8 core
128GB RAM
6 x 600GB 15K HDDs (thinking of RAID10)

My questions are:
Should i leave these two servers AS-IS or should i install VMWare or Hyper-V to split these two into maybe 4 VM's (two on each server)?

We have 105 people who will be using the servers with perhaps 15% growth this year. They run very heavy excel macros. I've seen some excel sheets taking 400MB+, and each user could have several open at a time.

I'm not sure if any whitepapers exist that will explain performance, amount of users, etc. We have current servers in a farm to help load balance. However, they are reaching a limit on resources with the current servers. 

I need to be able to get as much performance as possible with these servers.

some advice for Terminal server (Remote Desktop) hardware

Servers are computing devices that are similar to desktop computers in that they have the same basic components, but are significantly different in size, configuration and purpose. Servers are usually accessed over a network, and many run unattended, without a computer monitor, input device, audio hardware or USB interfaces. Many servers do not have a graphical user interface (GUI), and are configured and managed remotely. Servers typically include hardware redundancy such as dual power supplies, RAID disk systems, and ECC memory, along with extensive pre-boot memory testing and verification. Critical components might be hot swappable, and to guard against overheating, servers might have more powerful fans or use water cooling.

Server Hardware

Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, based on the Microsoft Vista codebase, is the last 32-bit server operating system released by Microsoft. It has a number of versions, including including Foundation, Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, Web, HPC Server, Itanium and Storage; new features included server core installation and Hyper-V.

Windows Server 2008

The Microsoft Legacy Operating System topic includes legacy versions of Microsoft operating systems prior to Windows 2000: All versions of MS-DOS and other versions developed for specific manufacturers and Windows 3/3.1, Windows 95 and Windows 98, plus any other Windows-related versions, and Windows Mobile.