Question : TS RemoteApp (Outlook 2007) traffic usage

Hi experts,

We have set up outlook as remote app in 4 sites for our customer (+/- 40 users in total but mostly around 15 to 20 concurrent users). We have 2 Servers (Server 2008) on the main site (1 only for Terminal Server, other one Exchange/AD/DNS/...).
Sites are fully meshed via VPN tunnels.

Users are complaining that outlook is working slowly.
They use outlook for their mails,attachments and mainly for the planning of their appointments. Users have multiple calendars opened so they can check/add/modify appointmoints for the coworkers.
Every site has a local fileserver, in remote app they have a networkconnection to that server to save their attachments. Printers are also connected.

We did bandwidth tests to check the usage of remote app. We used a new pc that only had outlook remote app installed and did nothing else.
For this test we did some 'normal' user activities, this was done from a remote site:
- Open outlook
- Open & read mails
- Open calendars
- Add & remove appointments in own & other user's calendars
- Open & view attachments (doc, ppt,..)
- Download attachments to local file server
- Send mails with & without attachments
- ...
See "RemoteAppTraffic.jpg" for the results. You can see there are peaks up to 102KBytes and an avarage of around 40KB.

Is this to be expected from outlook as a remote app? And specific with multiple calendars opened by almost all users?
Our upload in the main site is 256kbps guaranteed (SDSL) or 1.5Mbps (Cable). Could (one of) these handle the remote app usage from 20 users?

Attachments:

RemoteAppTraffic.jpg (50 KB) (File Type Details) 

Traffic test remote app outlook

Answer : TS RemoteApp (Outlook 2007) traffic usage

According to my research on TS RemoteApp, each session will consume at least 40kb of bandwidth (not counting other types of network traffic. (same as what you have arrived in your experiment)

So, your 256kbps guaranteed is obviously the bottleneck if there are total 20 concurrent session (at least) at any given time.

To conclude, you need a network bandwidth of at least 2MB (SDSL) or you need to move the server to a data centre if you expect that all 40 users will start to use  TS RemoteApp in near future.