Vmware and Terminal Servers

[frantzcollini]

Hello,

i would like, in a production environment, which performance can be reached on Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server virtual machine instead of physical machines.

I heard that the virtualization environment is not the best for terminal Server machines... i use VMWare ESX 3.5 in our company and it is good, but i do not have virtualized Terminal Server machines.

Are there some suggestions?

Thank you, cheers!

Francesco, from Italy

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Moved to VI: Virtual Machine and Guest OS forum.

I have customers using Terminal Servers just fine. The main thing to keep in mind is the load on each TS. You may have to reduce the # of users per VM but can add more VMs as needed.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[TomHowarth]

Francesco,

Terminal Services works just fine in VI3. true you cannot get as many users on a Virtual TS server as you can a Phyiscal one but that is to be expected, they are both designed to stress the physical hardware. in the case of a Virtual TS farm you would build out. keep your guests lean. single vCPU and only 2Gb of Ram. you will hit performace issues on user limit before soaking up the virtual hardware.

the main issues surround context switching, this is minimised by running single vCPU guests, as sheduling is not as stressed. the main thing is this, where optimising TS servers for performance was important in the phyiscal world it is more so in the virtual. the more wasted resource you can claw back, by locking down, will bring back better utilisation.

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator