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I need to know the answer from different aspects.

1) Where can I set the maximum number of concurrent sessions in the admin tools?

2) What's the most common hardware configuration for a Terminal Server that you have seen and how many concurrent sessions can it support?

3) What's the most powerful hardware confiugration for a Terminal Server that you have seen and how many concurrent sessions can it support?

EDIT

Assuming that the user is just using Microsoft Office and maybe some admin tools.

Harvey Kwok
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  • This should probably be a community wiki. The answer to question 1 is a simple "here it is", but 2 and 3 will be very subjective. – mfinni Jan 26 '11 at 13:36
  • @mfinni How can I mark it a community wiki? I am happy to do this. – Harvey Kwok Jan 26 '11 at 22:22
  • Explained here: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-wiki-posts - edit your question and check the box "community wiki " – mfinni Jan 27 '11 at 02:43
  • @mfinni Sorry, I couldn't find the check box. Is the post outdated? Or I need to have enough rep to do this? – Harvey Kwok Jan 27 '11 at 07:10
  • I don't have the answer to your question, sorry. – mfinni Jan 27 '11 at 11:15

2 Answers2

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Our TS servers are each configured with two dual-core Intel Xeon 3.2 GHz processors and 8GB of RAM running W2K3 EE SP2. Our users run Microsoft Office applications, our own application, IE, Adobe Reader, Notepad, etc. We comfortably get 50-60 sessions per server and have had as many as 75 sessions with no percievable performance issues.

joeqwerty
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0

Answers for Win2k3. probably similar for Win2k and Win2k8. Not sure for NT 4.0 TS, only played with that while also running Metaframe.

  1. TS Configuration, or in a GPO
  2. (and 3) absolutely, without reservation, depend on what your users are going to be doing. Just Office apps - Outlook/Word/Excel? SAP? Oracle applications? Compiling? Some line-of-business app built on Progress, Delphi, and Netware?

So, without more constraints, your questions 2 and 3 are fairly impossible to answer, and if they were constrained, would be quite subjective to the answerer.

There are good guidelines for increasing the number and/or performance of TS servers : serve only apps, not whole desktops (in most cases). Reduce graphics. Make damn sure you've got BBWC on a RAID card or some other way of not introducing serious user-experience lag due to IO problems.

Other than that, it's like any other multi-user system - monitor the performance, and address bottlenecks by scaling up or scaling out.

mfinni
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