We are considering changing over to Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server sessions instead of traditional PCs.
It sounds like there would be a significant improvement in manageability, but I have two main concerns. First, approximately how much RAM would each terminal session running PWB as the shell require?
Second and more importantly, since nearly all activity on these computers is web access, the bandwidth burden on the TS server would have to be enormous in retrieving web pages, etc. (since it would be no longer distributed to each PC's network connection).
Do you know of a way to utilize the local PC's network connection to pull in off-network internet traffic requested by PWB, while PWB itself is running on the server as a RDP session?
PWB Heavy Surfing on W2K3 Server's Terminal Server
Moderators: Tyler, Scott, PWB v2 Moderator
We have been using PWB on a Terminal Server for about 4 years, in fact PWB was originally written to secure our Terminal Server. In the 4 years with heavy 24/7 use from 60+ WYSE Winterm Thin Clients spread across three states (MN, FL, and AZ), we have had 99% uptime with very little maintenance. This configuration allows one person (me) to manage over 150 staff and public workstations. The manageability is the reason we went to a Terminal Server in the first place.
The primary Terminal Server is a Gateway ALR 9000 Quad Xeon 550 with 4GB RAM, 6 RAID 5 SCSI HDDs, and 2 Network Cards running Windows 2000 and Citrix. The backup Terminal Server is a Gateway E-4200 PIII 500 with 384MB RAM running Windows 2000.
The clients are WYSE Winterm 3360SE terminals. These are solid state with no moving parts and one button to push. They are configured to Auto logon to the server and the server is set to only run PWB. The terminals have a failover function, where if the primary server is not available the client connects to the backup. All the clients are able to run on the primary server with an average of 14% CPU utilization, and 12% committed memory. The one time the primary server had a problem, all the clients were able to run on the backup server, but performance was slow and the CPU and memory were at 100%. Although the browsing was slow for the little bit the primary was down, it was enough to get us through.
The memory is the key factor in the usage percents. According to the Definitive Guide to Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services by realtimepublishers.com and Tricerat Software, a dual processor 2.4GHZ
Xeon with HyperThreading, 2GB RAM, and four SCSI RAID 10 hard drives would support as many as 200 Heavy/Structured task workers. The following link relates to Windows 2000, but should provide some useful info:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/docs/tscaling.doc
In the initial tests, all the network traffic was going through the 1st network card, so to balance the network performance all the clients connect to the 2nd network card. This seems to work well and we have had no network performance complaints. When the client connects to the server, all processing and network traffic is done on the server. The server is only sending screen shots to the client.
All in all the Terminal Server has made managing the public workstations easy and I am happy we went in that direction. If you want more details, or have questions, please post it here or email me at Support@TeamSoftwareSolutions.com.
--Scott
The primary Terminal Server is a Gateway ALR 9000 Quad Xeon 550 with 4GB RAM, 6 RAID 5 SCSI HDDs, and 2 Network Cards running Windows 2000 and Citrix. The backup Terminal Server is a Gateway E-4200 PIII 500 with 384MB RAM running Windows 2000.
The clients are WYSE Winterm 3360SE terminals. These are solid state with no moving parts and one button to push. They are configured to Auto logon to the server and the server is set to only run PWB. The terminals have a failover function, where if the primary server is not available the client connects to the backup. All the clients are able to run on the primary server with an average of 14% CPU utilization, and 12% committed memory. The one time the primary server had a problem, all the clients were able to run on the backup server, but performance was slow and the CPU and memory were at 100%. Although the browsing was slow for the little bit the primary was down, it was enough to get us through.
The memory is the key factor in the usage percents. According to the Definitive Guide to Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services by realtimepublishers.com and Tricerat Software, a dual processor 2.4GHZ
Xeon with HyperThreading, 2GB RAM, and four SCSI RAID 10 hard drives would support as many as 200 Heavy/Structured task workers. The following link relates to Windows 2000, but should provide some useful info:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/docs/tscaling.doc
In the initial tests, all the network traffic was going through the 1st network card, so to balance the network performance all the clients connect to the 2nd network card. This seems to work well and we have had no network performance complaints. When the client connects to the server, all processing and network traffic is done on the server. The server is only sending screen shots to the client.
All in all the Terminal Server has made managing the public workstations easy and I am happy we went in that direction. If you want more details, or have questions, please post it here or email me at Support@TeamSoftwareSolutions.com.
--Scott