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Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services
8. Server Sizing and Scalability
Posted by Benny Tritsch on August 3, 2008
[Server Sizing] [Requirements] [Scaling Up or Out] [Hardware Selection] [64 Bit]
If you are a terminal server administrator and you want to establish a new environment hosting remote desktops and applications, you may want to know what hardware you need to purchase. Questions like “What server hardware do I need if I want to give 100 users access to our corporate applications?” or “How many users can I expect to host on a single terminal server?” are not unusual. Unfortunately, there are no simple answers to such questions. Adequate terminal server sizing and capacity planning is a challenge.
There is a good reason for this; terminal server sizing is dependent on factors such as available server hardware, application requirements, type of users, network configuration, system availability, and risk tolerance. This implies that there are many unknown factors to start with, which makes it almost impossible to exactly predict the final result.
In the past, many industry experts referred to a commonly accepted rule of thumb that suggested 15 concurrent users per CPU. Today, due to changing requirements both from application and user side, this rule of thumb does not apply anymore. You cannot expect to find a simple solution by estimating user and resource requirements, or by performing some simple calculations and extrapolations leading you to proper results. There are, however, strategies helping you to estimate hardware and infrastructure requirements within certain limits. Such strategies are presented in this chapter.
But no strategy will ever be successful without gathering some important background information first. To properly size a terminal server environment, you need to analyze requirements and expectations of users, business managers and system administrators. The result of such an analysis will give you an initial idea about performance and resource requirements.
Adapting a terminal server environment in such a way that it meets the required performance level can be done by two different strategies:
- Scaling up, which refers to use increasingly larger hardware
- Scaling out, which is based on using multiple smaller systems that share the workload
Both strategies are based on good knowledge about the resource consumption when running the different applications you plan to be hosting on terminal servers. In the next sections, we will first look at how requirements can be analyzed and defined. This is followed by recommendations when to scale up and when to scale out. Finally, we will be giving you guidelines about selecting the right hardware and when to take advantage of 64-bit Windows Server 2008.
| Read in this chapter... | |
| 8 | Server Sizing and Scalability |
| 8.1 | Finding Out About Requirements |
| 8.2 | Scaling Up or Scaling Out? |
| 8.3 | Selecting the Right Hardware |
| 8.4 | Is 64-Bit the Solution? |