Question : Terminal Services Scaling

Hi

I was trying to spec servers up for 40 staff in a single company, one domain, one site moving from roaming profile logons to TS and had a look at this following white paper which states 128Mb base with 9.5 MB per user.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/overview/tsscaling.mspx

Server:
1 x Pentium III Xeon
 550 MHz
2 MB L2 Cache
4096 MB

Model Number: ProLiant 6400R
      
Knowledge Worker      170 Users

Recommended Memory
            Knowledge Workers,      Data Entry Workers
Memory per user (MB)      9.5,       3.5
System Memory (MB)      128
Total Memory      System + (# of Users x Memory per User)

Surely this couldnt be right?

What would you recomended as minimum spec for up to 40 workstations acting as thin clients to Terminal Services 2003 Server.
One exchange server, 2 domain controllers and a file server.

We have two servers available for TS.
Both 2Ghz Xeon with 2GB ram running Win 2003.

Would therefore one server suffice, perhaps with extra memory or would load balancing be the best solution?
Office 2003, web browsing, email, network shares.  Not much intensive software usage.

Could even keep the finance Sage computers on local access and less than 40 users actually requiring TS access.
There are between 20 and 30 users who work in different offices at different times but roaming profiles is a problem due to size of stored files.

Thanks for any suggestions
Jess

Answer : Terminal Services Scaling

You would not need to cluster the servers. nor would you need Enterprise edition per se.
Using a load-balancer and session handling, the two should be sufficient with the shared session directory being an existing file share to which both can connect.  

You can not run a TS on a domain controller without modifying the default domain controller policy to allow users who are not administrators to connect.

Do you currently use a User share that gets mapped as a drive when the user logs in?  This way the users can store their documents in the common share while the romaing profile will retain the basic information.  You could also limit the size of the roaming profile once all the users have moved  their critical documents from the profile to the share. Excluding some directories from roaming profile replication could be an option.

At some point, the same issue that led to the space use of the combined roaming profiles to grow will reoccur on the TS.

Remaining with the existing setup while altering where what is stored and what is copied by way of the roaming profile will be an approach that would not concentrate everything on a pair of servers.