Choosing processors for terminal server

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I am going to buy a server for terminal sessions. It must be able to serve about 500 concurrent sessions without any significant impact on performance. Each session will run a quiet simple app with low CPU resource consumption.

Today I am considering the following configuration: 4x 12 core AMD Opteron 6300 series with a ton of RAM of course.

This is my first project and I don't have any experience with hardware platforms. So i am wondering would that be enough to handle this workload? Or it will be an overkill? Would the Intel Xeon E5 dual CPUs perform this task better?

I have limited budget so i am trying to find the most cost effective solution and any help/advice will be much appreciated.

Thank You!

Lem

Posted 2014-05-30T10:52:19.757

Reputation: 3

Question was closed 2014-06-02T00:57:38.060

For that many connections, I would look at using something like VMWare or Microsoft App-V to stream the application if all you need is one app. – Austin T French – 2014-05-30T11:17:24.277

@AthomSfere thanks! i will test this approach. But the question is still open... – Lem – 2014-05-30T11:38:18.263

Answers

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Whether this will work or not is very much dependant on the applications.

On the face of it, I can't see the CPUs struggling as long as there is a boat load of RAM and fast disks (SSD or 15k disks)

What may prove this wrong is the nature of the apps. I know you mention that your app is simple - but is it a small app which requires a lot of CPU? Also - bear in mind, you will be running 500 windows explorer processes, potentially 500 AV agents, 500... you get the idea.

It is probably worth going with your config as it is and then adding additional servers as required. You can always implement load balancing on RDS boxes. This will also cover you in the event of a box dying and will allow you to better test windows patches to ensure they don;t screw up a mission critical application. Take a look at this article for more info.

Fazer87

Posted 2014-05-30T10:52:19.757

Reputation: 11 177

Good advice, thank you. Scaling out is in my future plans. But at this stage I need to figure out what equipment will fit my starting requirements. The primary app is very simple. It performs continuous background work. Each instance uses about 100mb of RAM and less then 1% of CPU.But as you correctly mentioned each app instance needs some environment/user session. So I presume will be a lot of concurrent threads and so on. Are these processors good enough for it? – Lem – 2014-05-30T13:28:46.817

Asked: 2014-05-30T10:52:19.757

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Active: 2014-05-30T12:23:30.437