Pros/Cons of Terminal Server

rehab

Gawd
Joined
Aug 23, 2005
Messages
772
i was wondering if you fellow geeks could tell me any real world pros/cons of running a terminal server with wyse terminals. i read up some; but im interested in the cons... any info will be greatly appreciated as well as earn you valuable gold earns and spoons in the afterlife.
 
Cons - initial cost, setup time, incompatibility of some applications, not for graphic or intensive applications.

pros - once it's in place, support a large number of users is a snap. long term cost savings.


If i were going to do a terminal server environment, i would wait until longhorn, because they are putting in individual application publishing not just full desktops.
 
I love the TS, but hate adobe and it's lack of support for it. Too many apps assume you have admin rights on it.

Other disadvantages:
Single point of failure
Not going to work for graphical apps like photoshop/viewing videos online
Trouble with external devices such as scanners. I had to setup a single workstation that all staff use for scanning, pulling images from cameras, working with text recog. software.
 
do you think that office 2003 across 600+ clients will be to heavy?
 
do you think that office 2003 across 600+ clients will be to heavy?


Is office2003/Internet Access ALL they are going to use? If so, then no it's not too heavy. you just have to plan your farm according to the load. I say farm because with 600 clients, you're going to need more than 1 box just to handle the load, let alone planning for potential failover.
 
We have around 50-100 HP thin clients that our employees use. There's absolutely no reason why these employees should have a full featured PC. All they use is office, email (outlook), and a backoffice application for our main management system. A thin client (1ghz, 512mb ram and 1gb flash) is perfectly fine for them. A handful of users (accounting, executives with laptops) get a full system.

P.S. - Wyse terminals are painfully slow and difficult to work with. Rapport (now known as WDM - Wyse Device Manager) is probably the most poorly put together software I ever attempted to work with. Altiris deployment put it to shame. I opted for the HP thin clients instead.
 
outlook, a medical manager program and thats about it. was looking at about 5 nodes in the cluster with load balancing implented. i am just worried that with each hospital's own particular method of VPN or remote gateway, that it will be difficult to configure on the server in the cluster that is intended for doctors only... anyway, thank you for your time and answers.
 
i use citrix and they have a remote access gateway applicance that handles all our remote access with no problems at all.

We have 8 main terminal servers that run about 60 - 70 active application sessions on each, with almost no lag. Any lag is usually caused by the wan network.

My total farm size is about 14 servers, from a dual p3- 1ghz to the dual 3.6 HT p4's on the high end.

Nice thing is that with the new intel core 2 based servers, you can get a quad (or dual quads for a hair more) core xeon with 4 GB ram for under $4k, which will handle a helluva lot of load.
 
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