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We are going to be using a terminal server to service our 11 users.

Microsoft Server 2008 Standard 64-bit.

Do you think this spec would work well?

Dell R200 Intel DualCore Xeon X3065 2.33Ghz

Dell R200 1U Rack Mount Chassis

4GB RAM

2 x 160GB SATA RAID 1 disks

The users are just going to be running MS Office, Sage and some other applications

Adam Chetnik
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  • thank you for your answers. We currently have a Windows 2003 Terminal Server running with 2GB RAM and 6 users which seems to work fine - They also have SQL 2005 Express running on teh sme box! – Adam Chetnik Jan 29 '10 at 20:30

4 Answers4

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You should really bump up the RAM on that server, don't forget that each user will need to have the applications they are running at least partially in RAM. Depending on how many users you are going to be connecting, you could easily need 6-8 GB or more of RAM available. Otherwise you are going to see the machine doing a lot of paging to disk and thus thrashing the hard drive(s).

Looking at Windows 2k3 terminal server I have running in a similar setup with 4 users on it currently, using the office suite. The 4GB and 1 Core allocated is just about enough. Of course they are also coming down a very slow pipe so that will limit resource utilization as well, they just can't do things fast.

The R200 can go up to 16GB of RAM, although it's kinda pricey at that point if you can afford it - get it, if not I would go to at least 8GB of ram.

Zypher
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    I agree with this, if you have the budget, RAM should be the first thing to boost. – Skaughty Jan 29 '10 at 19:52
  • +1 More RAM for sure! Would slso watch the SATA drives to makesure they don't create a bottleneck. With your low user caunt, may not be an issue – Dave M Jan 29 '10 at 20:00
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I vote this should be enough horsepower. Good luck!

Skaughty
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  • No way, at least 1.5-2GB is going to get eaten up by the OS. The leftover 2GB isn't going to give a good user experience. – DanBig Jan 29 '10 at 19:55
  • After thinking about it a little more, I would agree. 4GB will work, but I think 8-16 would make for happier users. – Skaughty Jan 29 '10 at 20:20
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If available get a Quad Core Xeon and 8-12GB or RAM to start.

It's processor that TS eats (espeically running Office) before RAM.

The more porcessors, the more processes (more programs per user session).

RAM is cheap, and you're already intending on going 64-bit, so get what you can afford.

techie007
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If by "Sage" you're referring to a practice management system or EMR/EHR (probably Intergy), I'll just note that I've never seen a Windows-based UI on one of those that wasn't a memory hog. I don't have any numbers for Intergy, but across several other products 100-200MB per client process is not uncommon.

If you're not really familiar with terminal services, once you have it up and running the important number is not so much how much memory is in use but how much physical memory is available. On a terminal server, if you get below 500-1000MB available physical memory you're probably going to start to feel it in response times.

fencepost
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