Question : Designing Windows 2008 Terminal Server to run under VMWare

I am designing a move of a 100 user physical server installation to a virtual environment.

At present we have 4 x Windows 2003 servers running DC/Exchange/SQL/ProgressDB/File and print etc and 6 x Windows 2000 Terminal servers. I load balance using 2X

I have good experience of VMWare and Windows 2008 which is the platform I wish to go to, but I am concerned about performance.

So my questions.....

1) We have 4Gb in the terminal servers at the moment (32 bit Windows 2000 can only see 3GB though). This means that over around 23 users the system starts to stop (which is why we have this over capacity 6x23 = 138 users). Does anyone have experience of how many users Winodws 2008 can realistically take under Terminal Server. I presume that the 64bit version with say 16GB RAM would improve this situation. Any stats anyone ?

2) Unless there's a user limit as discussed above, what's the point of virtualizing two Terminal Servers on the same physical box - You could jsut have one big terminal server ? (you could still virtualize this to make it hardware independent though).

3) If you have say 4 physical machines to virtualise the above 10 servers on would I not get a performance issue depending on which other servers end up on the same physical servers as my terminal servers. For example my DB server does certian application processes from time to time which hit the processor quite hard. If this was happening on the same physical server as one of my terminal servers then surely this would affect performance. Terminal server performance is very sensitive. Would it be better to have all virtual terminal servers on maybe 2 or 3 physical servers, which sort of brings me back to point 2.

Many thanks
 

Answer : Designing Windows 2008 Terminal Server to run under VMWare

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