Is anyone using Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services yet?

I have implemented a terminal server 2008 environment at a customer with powerfuse 2008 on top if it. But as thinclients the customer uses Sun ray tc's and they are not compatible with the new RDP protocol yet and neither is Powerfuse2008. So eventually after a lot of troubleshooting we decided to rollback the complete environment to the proven 2003 server. This environment runs smootly performs better and we don't have compatibility issues anymore. I think server 2008 is a great product I run it in my testlab with xenapp5.0 on top of it and it runs smoot.

I think RES will support this as of November 18th when PowerFuse SR3 is released Hans. It will certainly support XA 5.0 and Softgrid 4.5.

I use it in production for a small but growing number of remote users.  These users actaully used to be on our Citrix platform but we found that TS2008 + WebConnect (Free Version) gives them exactly what they need.
Strangley enough, TS2008 Easy Print was not so easy for us.  We ended up getting some Net2Printer licenses through Ericom and that did the trick.
We hope to move the remaining Citrix users over soon.

For large customers we are still in the testing and pre-production stages, but a lot of companies are still not 2008 ready with their 'in house' skills and/or processes.  The smaller clients are a lot more interested in setting up Server(s) with a TSGW front end.  For me the TSGW and session broker is trickier to set up than a Citrix Farm + CSG/CAG (but that could be my skill set).

One real solution that I am backing is using the TSGW and RDP to a desktop rather than a Terminal Server, this gives remote access over SSL to your Desktop bypassingthe TS Servers.

Still on TS2003 with Citrix & WI. We need the two-fold authentication for remote access.

Numerous calls to the folks at RSA about TS2008 & IIS7. "It's coming" is the only response I get.

While not it production as of Yet, I do have a web access test Scenario complete with WSS 3.0 Integration. We have an AX 5 roleout coming soon and we will be moving our test systems to Prod concurrently to work as a deployment feature to our remote end users. 

I have to say, the lack, or removal, of the AD Integrated feature for Web access was a bit dissapointing, but there are still viable features worth exploring offered with the current package.

True, Res was working hard to get solutions. I reported a few interesting calls for them but also at Microsoft to other channels the through support calls. Some bug I found was the a normal user could open network neighborhood and get emediatly some buttons like search printers etc. Very unwanted but at Microsoft they wondered why the heck you would want to hide those things....well for users who don't know what they doing besides messing up your terminal server :) Sun also admitted they aren't ready for windows server 2008 and are also working on it. What made me wonder was al the inhouse software worked like a charm :) you would expect that that would be your bottleneck and not stuf from major big companies.

We're running a couple of TS 2008's for our SMB clients and found no issues with it, besides being very careful about LOB compatibility. GPO Preferences are a also a great add-on in a TS environment. Not much luck with Easyprint here either, and ThinPrint doesn't support TS 2008 yet.
It's indeed strange that with W2K8 being out for almost a year by now, there's still a large number of major players in the SBC market that still don't support 2008 yet. 

Another strange thing. I've found that Terminal Services on 2008 performs/scales even worse on VMware ESX than TS 2003. Though i might doubt my own testing abilities this really seems apparent.

Test deployed at a client.  Works good, except for some craplication that don't support the new kernel, so rolled back to 2003.

 The biggest problems are the apps that don't support the new software and upgrading all your TS and server cals to 2008

I have asked a New Horizon instructor "How popular are the Windows 2000 classes?" He said the demand is low.

I also asked him, "How popular are the Vista classes?" He said the demand is also low.

I  know of no company of any size who is implementing Vista or Windows 2008 in a large scale. Most companies have evaluated these new MS offerings but have not gone beyond the evaluation phase.

We use 2008 in a ASP/SaaS environment and need to scale to 1500+ users. We started a pilot on 2008RC1 and we were so satisfied some clients wanted to use it for production, while there were at 2003CitrixPS4. For us, being a hosted services company, the costs really matter. The most valued features of Citrix are too expensive, so the 2008TS looks like a good alternative. Comes

with the fact that 2008TS CAL's are on a SPLA per month lease costs, so no investments and scale with the actual paying number of users. We have to buy the very very expensive Citrix licenses and users have to use them for a year before we get a return on our investment (still no Citrix SPLA licenses are there? there was an article about that too on brianmadden.com)

But these are our findings;
- Citrix is still a nice to have for some clients (as we don't have managing capabilities of our clients as we only have something to say about the serverside). Some (older) Thinclients

require Citrix or are not compatible with rdc 6.1. Also the proxycapabilities of the citrix client are in some thight environments required. The rollout of a citrix client is much less hassle as a WinXPSP3 with .NET Framework 3.0SP1 (for TS Easyprint).
- TS2008 makes silo'ing not that easy as under citrix. We hope to solve this through App-V, but for now Citrix gives us more flexibility. App-V 4.5 show promising as the interaction of the bubbles lets us use the same bubbles over different clients, but for now we only have 3 apps on each terminal server, so this is managable without App-V as long as we have flexibility for our Silo's.
- As a guest said at 16 oct at 2:42 here above, the mix of 2008TS and ESX performs realy bad in our case, the memory usage of 2008 is through the roof compared to 2003CitrixPS4. But this might be a ESX config issue, still 2003Citrix performs excellent on ESX.. Then we use ESX only for our POC, it is a temp solution as the POC is completed with 100 users, we will be moving to dedicated hardware as we need to scale up. So this bothers me a bit, but isnt a dealbreaker.
- i dont think the SB is that good for lots of users, we are planning to use redundant KEMP LB solution for SB functionality (as Brian mentioned). We are taking in account the thing of the single point of failure of the SB as well. KEMP is very nice company for this thing; they offered us to "test" the appliances before buying them, very nice. I do not have commercial benefits for saying this, just a opinion.
- The TS Web interface is nothing compared to Citrix' WI. We ended up not using the TSWeb functionality, most because of the lack of the missing flexibility to authorise icons in the WI

based on AD groups, also we like to have a SSO, as for the most of our users we can't explain them to logon twice (or 3 times as the application asks for another authentication). Also the TSweb needed to be a domain member (if we wanted to get SSO with 3rd party working). All together this too much tweaking to get to work.
- We used Tokens for some of our roaming users, there was no out-of-thebox solution with TS2008/TSWeb (only with Sharepoint), so we use Citrix for that as well.
- TS Easyprint works really good for us, no need to config any of that to this point. But i worry a bit about the printbandwith and CPU spikes that printing has at this point, but this might be ESX related as well. It needs more looking into.
- UAC was a bit of work, but it works in our advantage now, because of the redirect capabilities (a lot of use with 3rd party apps), We replaced the isolation environtment of citrix with UAC. Still, the policies are not that obvious and gives mostly an unexpected result, looks like this is a rushed feature but that is my opinion aswell. The UAC for admins bugs me tremendously, i didnt take enought time to research this properly.
- TS2008 uses a lot of memory and has a lot of CPU spikes, this might be due to our ESX environment, but as i said 2003PS4 works flawlessly. Still, it looks like a Vista feature requiring a lot more hardware, which is not nice, but not that too big of a problem as we can replace some of our Citrix users with 2008TS. Our hardware is only a small amount of the total costs and Citrix is 2 to 3 times as more expensive per user per month than our hardware costs, so thats our reason not to have that much of a problem with more hardware requirements. And i still have to do a dedicated hardware test and i expect it to be much more better than at ESX.

Bottom Line
We are now deploying XenApp5 besides the 2008TS environment for our users, for the issues described above, i think our 100% 2003PS4 environment will be replaced by 70% TS2008 and 30% Citrix. We have to see how good TS2008 scales to 1500+ users, we still have to do tests for that kind of environtment, but we want to move to dedicated hardware for that.

Hey Nick

Can you keep us posted on how things go for you on win2K8 and Xenapp5? Interested to know how things go.

There is a connection broker in WS08: TS Session Broker.

"However, how do you dynamically manage users, servers, applications, data, monitoring of data, from one area?"

> with the session broker, its easy to create "farms" and use them for silo'ing. The best way to go though would be App-V i think. But for now we use the silo'ing in 2008TS in conjunction with XenApp5 for granular control.

"In addition, how would you account for VDIs in conjuction with physical & virtual host servers? "

> Not so much, because this is outside our ballpark.. we get more out of TS than VDI.. but we're watching.. closely..

Test Environment. Distinct lack of information regarding configuration fine tuning. Loads of issues. Any chance you could write a book Brian your last one on 2000/3 was invaluable?

The biggest problems are the apps that don't support the new software and upgrading all your TS and server cals to 2008