Tim Mangan (of TMugent Technologies) has released another great white paper, this time about how applications run on 64-bit Terminal Servers (and of course 64-bit Citrix Presentation Servers).
From the paper:
New servers based on what is generally called the “x64” architecture CPUs from AMD and Intel are now available on the market. These new processors allow for a 64-bit operating system to run both 64 and 32-bit applications side-by-side without modification.
This advance is of great interest to the Terminal Server and Citrix communities due to the unique scalability limitations of the 32-bit Terminal Server, which is limited to 4GB of usable RAM and suffers from a shortage of “Page Table Entries” (an internal housekeeping function of the Microsoft OS).
With the necessary software finally coming together, it will soon become viable to run x64 based Terminal Servers. In addition to scalability due to x64, enterprises may see form factor (dual core) and price incentives to buy x64 on new servers in the near future.
This short paper addresses the question of which applications need be, or should be, 64-bit executables when run on an x64 based server.
You can get for full paper from the white paper section of Tim's website.