I need to improve our TS solution

[mrbios]

At the moment we only have about 40 terminals in the school, most of which are very rarely used and treated as very low priority.

 

We used to have two load balanced HP DL360 G4s, quite old but did the job. They died and due to the amount the terminals we're used a DL320G5 was setup in their place, on it's own with only 8GB of ram.

 

This has since proven to have been a bad idea as it's now DREADFULLY slow as it's starting to get used more and ore, no where near enough memory and no doubt the piddley processor in there is struggling too. I have it currently running Server 2008 32bit due to all our windows 7 machines being 32bit and software shortcuts reflecting that (we run a redirected start menu school wide) and i hate it as server 2008 pre R2 i don't like at all.....i won't go as far to call it **** as i'm sure it has it's upsides, i just haven't seen them.

 

The final issue is that we have no money left until april, so i'm looking to do what i can armed with a MSVL and two physical servers Not sure if the terminals themselves support anything different that could cause improvement, there pretty old though.

[dhicks]

Not sure if the terminals themselves support anything different that could cause improvement, there pretty old though.

 

If it's any help, I found that running Windows Server 2008 R2 improved graphics performance on terminals, but really only on more modern machines (we found those Acer Revos worked well). I assume this is due simply to newer machines having more capable processors with a built-in graphics capability.

 

If you need to reduce the load on your TS server(s) you could try booting in to a Linux distribution on the terminal and handle web-browsing locally, with Windows-based software available via shortcuts to RDesktop menu options. Interestingly, I found that RDesktop seemed to be able to handle vide just fine when connected to a Server 2008 R2 TS server, despite only using Remote Desktop 5.something - it's the terminal hardware that seemed to make the main performance difference. You can't do fancy USB redirection and so forth with RDesktop, though.

 

--

David Hicks

[gotenks1321]

Might not be any help but I setup an old laptop here with a very cutdown version of XP and then ran everything through Remote Desktop to a 2003 TS. Smartboard software and drivers are run locally but everything else is on the TS server, seems to run ok for the age of the hardware. Same kind of thing David is saying with moving a bit more to the terminal rather than the server, I just wasn't so sure on how people would find Linux and whether I could get the SMART software running on it.

[Butuz]

Ouch. The DL320G5 if it is the same model I am thinking of, is NOT NOT NOT suited to serving 40 clients. With only a single dual core cpu and only 2 x hard drives there are going to be big bottlenecks when trying to serve 40 clients.

 

Infact in all honesty my quad core RM desktop I am typing this on would probably do a better job!!

 

I would be willing to wager the main bottleneck you will run into will be the CPU. With only 2 x cores available theyre probably spending most of their time on 100%. Have you sat and watched task manager on the server?? The next bottleneck will be hard drive speed (I assume your running Raid 1 with the on board low end raid card?). Your basically only reading data off one hard drive, and your having to write data twice. Sloooooow. I doubt RAM will be your bottleneck as 8GB over 40 clients is adequate.

 

Basically - I can't honey coat it. You need to buy a new server. And until you get one, there is very little you can do to help IMHO.

 

Butuz

[Ric_]

You will get a massive performance benefit from simply moving to Server 2008 R2 (or even Server 2008 x64). To fix your shortcut issues use junction points (I have c:\progs set as a junction point to "C:\Program Files (X86)" on the x64 boxes and to "c:\program files" on the x86 boxes).

[CyberNerd]

Infact in all honesty my quad core RM desktop I am typing this on would probably do a better job!!

 

They would. Our TS farm is now a mix of blade servers and desktop motherboards

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/general-chat/64837-cheapskate-server-farm.html