What method do I choose to get more users on a physical BOX…., in the x64 Terminal Server / Citrix forum on BrianMadden.com

At the moment we are running Terminal Services/CPS 4.5 on Dell 1950’s with 4 GB or RAM.
We are running into a dilemma with space and power issues in our data centre, this seems to be a common issue worldwide at the moment.

We would like to increase the density of the users on our Physical machines so that we can remove some of our Terminal Servers…

What are the pros and cons to running x64 based Terminal Server versus running VMWare instances of 32-bit Terminal Server on the same physical box. Will I get more users using VMWare or more using 64 bit Terminal Server?

I will have to increase the memory on our servers accepted. Drivers will have to be looked at in the x64 version, but the only drivers I think we will have issues with are Printers and we will have to look for a solution to that…..

There are scalability docs for both x64 Terminal Server and VMWare out there on the web but I would like to hear from real world experience where Administrators out there have experience out there. We are about to undergo our own testing to look at both possible solutions…. Will post any results here. But does anyone have any initial opinions?

Joe

Hi,

Have a search in this forum and the virtualization one as this exact same topic has been kicked around several times.

Cheers,

It all depends on what your bottleneck is... In some cases, you may be able to switch to Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and just add more memory. It all depends on the application workload and what resources it requires.

Joe