Terminal Services information and guidance

[dellboy]

Before anyone shouts I know that this is a Citrix forum but there is no Terminal Services forum and both products are essentially the same if I am not mistaken.


I am investigating rolling out a Terminal Services (TS) solution for a company. The whole setup is a mis-match of differing hardware and OS ranging from 95,98,XP and 2000. The servers are running NT4.0 and Win2000 in a mixed mode.

I have started to read all the documentation on MS but am hoping that someone can magically wave a wand and give me all the info I need :O)

If anyone has any info/experience/guidance can you share it with me. I seem to have got my head round the licensing but now its things like:

1. Should the domain be upgraded to pure W2k or will mixed mode be fine
2. Will TS install on a 95 client, 98 client and run
3. What spec hardware should be used server side and is there a minimum client spec? (I have seen some documentaiton on server side)
4. Should the TS server be mirrored/load balanced incase of failure
5. How many users can be placed on one server (realistically) I appreciate hardware will affect this

As you can see I have lots of questions and while there are lots of papers and documents experience is always best. I have read the FAQ written by others. If anyone can share their experiences and opinions I would be greatful

Cheers

 

[Petje]

1st of all... Terminal Services and Citrix Metaframe are 2 different things...
Citrix Metaframe is a "add-on" to Terminal Services. (do not understand me wrong... best "add-on" there is...)

Problem with just terminal services is that you can just offer a desktop to users. load ballancing and those things are not really supported.

And for my oppinion... When you want to develop a real Server Based Solution you should deploy Terminal Services in combination with Citrix Metaframe.

Much more possibility´s...

And for how many users on a server..... that depends.. what kind of applications.... what hardware.. etc...

but on average you see about 40 to 50 users on a decent server.....

but as I said.. all depends on many factors...

I would say.. browse around a bit on the citrix website...

Patrick
MCSE, MCP, A+, CCA

 

[JeffHicks]

I have never done a purely Terminal Services deployment. I think you will find this true of most of the regulars of this forum. Thus, I know very little about minimum requirements for TS client or how much network traffic will be created using a TS only implementation.

However, the domain should not affect the TS implementation anymore than it does your other systems. From my limited AD knowledge, I would say getting out of mixed mode should be a goal regardless of the effect on your TS servers.

The TS client will run on any Win32 OS. I think that is it though. If you want to boot from DOS or have Mac or Unix/Linux clients, TS can't do it.

I know of no easy way to load balance a TS implementation. The best I can think of is DNS round robin. As much as is possible, I would build redundancy into the setup.

As mentioned above, the user load is as much software dependent as it is hardware dependent. I have gotten 100 concurrent users on a server with 1 GB of RAM and have had a server that had 2 GB of RAM bog down after 25 users. 40 users is a good rule of thumb, but I would strongly suggest you plan on something like 30 so that you are not caught off guard.

Depending on the size of your implementation, I strongly believe you will be happier with a Citrix implementation. You do not have to worry as much about client requirements, they have several additional products (NFuse, Secure Gateway, Install Mgr) that make setting up and administering your implementation MUCH easier.

Good luck.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

No magic wand, I'm afraid, but there's loads of experience on this forum!

1. Mixed mode will cause a few Administrative headaches, especially with Terminal Services licensing, Policies and Roaming Profiles. Go with Windows 2000 server, as you do not specify whether your NT4 machines are Terminal Server Edition or not.
2. Yes.
3. Server - it depends on user load. This must be profiled in advance. Minimum client spec - can't remember for RDP (Terminal Services), but ICA (Citrix) will run on a 286 with 8Mb RAM and DOS 5.0. RDP will run on Windows 3.11 very happily and at least 486 - probably lower.
4. MS Load-Balancing (AKA DNS Round-Robin) is not the same as Citrix Load Management by a chalk of any length. Citrix Load Management directs ICA client login broadcasts to the server with the lightest load. Round-Robin just cycles through available servers. Mirroring Servers sounds like an expensive waste of hardware - a VMWare Solution might do you better, depending on your budget and server number requirements. With VMWare, you can simply re-create a server on the fly. It's not fault-tolerance for sure, but then you'd be looking at expensive clustering solutions, which don't really suit Terminal Services. Very High Availability is good enough for most implementations, and MetaFrame provides the best software solution for this - the client automatically reconnects to published Apps no matter which server they are located on, and, if your data strategy is good, nothing will be lost.
5. It's not just hardware that affects how many users can log onto a Terminal Server - this is a "Piece of String" question. The other two main dependencies are what applications will be run, and how the users utilise those applications. This must be benchmarked in advance with some sample users - particularly "Power Users". You need to run the benchmark test over a period of time and see what results Perfmon returns - or purchase a heavy-duty monitoring tool such as Systrack for more realistic data.

I hope this helps