Terminal server potential load...

At the moment about 80% of staff have a laptop they take home - say 150 laptops in total

If those laptops were taken away and they were then told all there work had to be done by RemoteApp on our terminal server via their home PC (i would be adding about 50-60 programs to the remoteapp server) what sort of spec server/load balancing setup would i be looking at to cope with say 100 people connecting and running multiple programs each

Also this service may become available to students, of which we have 1170, if say only 150 connect at once, as it's unlikely more than that would be connected at once, we theoretically need the server to cope with 250-300 connections and possibly multiple programs from each.

Currently i have a spare HP DL360G5 running VMware with 8GB ram, 2 x quad core processors (E5440s). Naturally 8GB ram won't be enough but what else would i need to ensure this runs as smoothly as possible for up to 250-300 people at once? Is remoteapp more efficient on the server than a full blown TS session or pretty much the equivilent?

--- i've tried to over estimate the amount of people who will connect at once, 250-300 is probably far more than we would realisticly have but i wouldn't want to plan for less---

Depends on the exact apps. If your runnning SIMS etc that can eat lots of RAM and CPU.

Either way for 250 - 300 concurrent connections you'll be looking at at the very least three dual processor servers each with 16+gb of RAM. I'd suggest having seperate servers for pupils and staff in order to keep staff apps seperate.

Ill be watching this post as this is something I would like to set up at some stage in the future (just for staff).

Let us know how you get on.

Butuz

Thank you Butuz, I think i will work it in slowly, it'll be around a 5 stage rollout.
First rolling it out to some test staff to bug test it all
Second rolling it out to all staff to get some idea of the load and how they cope
Third rolling it out to 6th form
Fourth and fifth stages rolling it out to the older students followed by the younger students

Personally i want to go for the approach where by we say "we want your laptops back". As i have done a questionaire so far having had 60 responses back and only 1 person doesn't have the internet at home and only 4 don't have a home PC, so in this day and age there's no reason for us to be spending £300 on a laptop when these people could be sat at home on their existing computer doing everyting remotely, if we didn't buy laptops every year we would be saving the school somewhere between £5-10k a year!! as well as all the support hours and hassle they cause!
Obviously the down side is people will start asking us to fix their home PCs, but we'll have to have some sort of new school policy where by staff are told "your home pc is your responsibility, you need to use the support contract that came with the PC from the place of purchase" with the same going for their internet connection..... something like that anyway, im just in the brain storming stage at the moment :D