Terminal Server Licensing

[reaser]

Working on a network with a Windows 2000 Terminal Server running as an application server. It appears they have a 25 user license.

They are running Quickbooks and 2 Industry specific applications through a connector called New Moon Canaveral.

The company is growing and they are to the point that periodically throughout the day all 25 licenses are being used. Users can not login and the applications are running extremely slow.

First thing I need to do is add more licenses. Best options for doing so?
Is it safe to assume the server can't handle the load or would it be that they don't have enough bandwidth, or possibly both? The hosting site has a bonded T for 3Mb.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. And any input on where to buy more licensing would also be appreciated.

[YeOldeStonecat]

Server 2000 makes me think an older server, so possibly performance there. Would be wise to look at several things:
*Requirements per each software being run on a per user session. Recent versions of quickbooks need a lot of balls to run well.
*Compare against the specs of the TS box
*A 3 meg pipe can squeeze 25 users, depending what else is putting a load on this pipe, as well as QoS capabilities of the router.

[reaser]

A little more detail for you:

2008 Accounting Edition for Quickbooks
2 Real Estate applications for contacts and appointments and so on
WINS server

Server Specs:
Windows 2000 SP4
P4 1700Mhz
750Mb Ram

I have no idea why the previous Tech built this system so poorly but that's what is in place.

The 3Mb also hosts our Primary DC, File Backup Server and Sharepoint Server. Backups run in the evening so this doesn't effect bandwidth during the day.

[YeOldeStonecat]

Server Specs:
Windows 2000 SP4
P4 1700Mhz
750Mb Ram

Big time OUCH! That's not even up to recommended specs to run Quickbooks for a single workstation!
Probably IDE/SATA hard drive too...instead of SCSI/SAS?

[reaser]

Exactly my thoughts! OUCH!

So I take it a 2003/2008 Terminal Server 15krpm scsi drives 8gb ram (enough?) would eliminate some of these issues.

Sharepoint and Primary DC and a better Terminal Server will 3Mb pipe still be enough to handle 25 to 30 users without slowing everything down?

I know the hardware was a problem from the beginning. But before I go with a quote for new hardware and say this will resolve the problem I'm wondering if the 3Mb pipe will still cause some issues. Am I looking at upgrading both, maybe adding another bonded T to bring it to 4.5Mb?

[YeOldeStonecat]

Heck even a Pentium D with 4 gigs of RAM with be better. Those early Pentium 4's were dogs...dogs dogs dogs. 768 megs of RAM is barely enough for the server to sit at idle doing nothing, not to mention hosting desktop sessions.

As for the 3 meg pipe....it depends, with streaming lining of the remote users desktop experience..it can be workable. But I don't know what else shares this pipe, or what kind of router is doing the NAT and QoS...if any.

[reaser]

Unfortunately I can't get approval for a new Server. Response was "it has worked for years, why change it now?"

I will stay on top of this though because it's only a matter time before the maxed out users bring this system down.

We have Cisco 1800 series routers. This location also has our SharePoint 2003 Server, Primary DC, and a file server. Not much traffic on this file server. The heavy load is given to a file server at another location.

[YeOldeStonecat]

Unfortunately I can't get approval for a new Server. Response was "it has worked for years, why change it now?".

Well...the complaint was over how slow it ran, right?
You can show them that your Terminal Server is below recommended specs from Intuit for their software...your server by itself falls below specs to run QB in single user mode. Not to mention multi-user mode (it's all just math)...and added overhead of Terminal Server itself, PLUS the added overhead of running that other software, Canavaral, I haven't seen the system requirements for that package, per user.