Terminal Services, NLB & 350 users

[zappo]

Terminal Services, NLB & 350 users

Hi there,

I am plannig a new domain on Win2k for my college dorm, each student would have a thin client in the room. We have 350 rooms, each with a single student.

Planning to deploy terminal services on the IBB thin clients, with basic services like office 2000, ftp etc. I believe TS cannot do clustering, only Load balancig via NLB. What are the problems I may face ? The plan is to deploy one DC and one or more TS server with VLANing. Would it be bettr if I just deployed a single high end server or should I go for load balancing ? any and all suggestions welcome.

 

[yizhar]

HI.

You might get into problems with the VLAN switches and NLB - I myself have no such experience but I know of a colleague who have problems with similar config.

You should consider a simpler old fashion alternative: instead of using NLB simply have each server with its own ip, and configure the clients with 2 connections - one for each server. I don't know what the IBB clients are so I don't know if it is practical in your case.

Obvoiusly - a single DC is a single point of failure, so you must have an additional DC that will also be configured as an additional Global Catalog server.

Were are users going to save their files?
Letting them save to the TS is not a good idea, because -
A. They can fill the server disk with junk.
B. They will need to access the files from both TS server.
C. You will probably need central management and backup for data.

So I suggest something like the following:
* 2 Active Directory and file servers, using DFS to replicate files between them.
* 2 Dedicated TS application servers.

Bye
Yizhar Hurwitz

http://come.to/yizhar

http://teachers.sivan.co.il/yizhar