Any advantage in having multiple 2008 terminal servers?

[maark]

Have trialled running sims net as a TS remote app on a server 2008 terminal server - virtual server in hyper v. All works ok with about 10 users. Now want to scale up to whole staff - probably about 90/100 concurrent users. Should I setup 3 servers in a farm with load balancing or just have make sure the one server has loads of ram etc devoted to it?
Have heard reports of problems with schools trying to do the same with a lot of staff.
We are currently using an ancient citrix system based on 3 aging servers and they want £11000 to update licences so I need to replace it.
Any advice appreciated as strugglijg to find an answer on the web.

[strawberry]

3 servers, if one fails the other 2 will work.

[maark]

good point - staff can't be without sims to take registers.

[dhicks]

Should I setup 3 servers in a farm with load balancing or just have make sure the one server has loads of ram etc devoted to it?

I'd aim for 3 servers - this thread:

Hardware requirements for Terminal Server

might help for some background reading, although it is a year old now. As discussed there, RAM scales up to around 24GB okay, but further than that it starts to get more expensive as you need fancier (and slower) RAM. You'd probably do best to have three servers rather than try and get three servers-worth of RAM in to one server, that'd give you more processing power available per user and, as pointed out above, some fail-over capability.

A simple form of load balancing could be done just with round-robin DNS - each request for "TSERVER" is sent to one of three different IP addresses in turn.

[glennda]

Again yes i would go with three seperate ones - for the failover

[maark]

Thanks for advice on this - going to get 3 servers going - on different nic's - though it looks as though ram is the more crucial factor.

[glennda]

How many virtual hosts do you have? do they have shared storage? As if you have multiple it might be worth setting it up so that you have VMs on different hosts so that if the host goes down you have sims still in place.

Toby

[maark]

Not shared storage but have 2 hosts - also running DPM 2010 so can backup virtual servers and restore them.

[dhicks]

going to get 3 servers going - on different nic's - though it looks as though ram is the more crucial factor.

I don't think I'd bother running a Terminal Services server as a VM, I'd just buy 3 physical servers and let TS use the whole of each server. TS servers are basically big client machines and should be treated as such - image them and have software automatically install the same way you would a standard Windows workstation.

[maark]

Don't really see the point of buying 3 more physical boxes - trying to reduce the amount of servers - surely virtualisation offers easier backup and recovery. Less chance of failure as long your host is a decent server - and can restore images to a different server anyway. Also less power and ups to worry about.

[localzuk]

Thanks for advice on this - going to get 3 servers going - on different nic's - though it looks as though ram is the more crucial factor.

I think people are saying more that you should maybe split this across physical hosts also. You're putting all of your eggs in a single basket if you put all 3 virtual servers on one box.

[strawberry]

nice thing about a ts farm using session broker is you can use any old tat as long as your set the weightings properly. Theres not harm in running more than one ts vm on a node but it is worthwhile making sure you have at least 2 physical servers running the vm's.