Effective Engineering and Planning for Server Based Technologies, such as Microsoft Terminal Services and Citrix Presentation Server.

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Effective Engineering of Thin Client Environments!!

Forward engineer and plan your thin client environment to meet your customer needs, and maximize the end user experience. Project planning, infrastructure assessment, to customer training, are all key components of successfully integrating and deploying Thin Client Solutions. Forward Engineering and planning your Thin Client deployment is vital to a successful deployment.

Remember, it will only be thin if you engineer it to be thin. You can install and configure all of the most expensive thin client products on the market, and if you don't properly engineer the environment to be thin, you will defeat the purpose of which you are trying to accomplish. This section is geared toward and will outline some of the key points in forward engineering your Thin Client environment to be as thin as it can be. And get the most out of this awesome technology.

Forward Engineering Your environment to be Thin and well integrated

Security - Windows NT single master Domain or Win2k or 2003 Active Directory for integrated security and central management and administration, and to Centralize logon accounts and logon scripts.

Server sizing - and memory requirements are very important, and should be based on application and customer load requirements. The industry rule of thumb used to be 1 CPU per 15 concurrent users. However as server technology evolves, more than 15 sessions per processor is now possible. Depending on the applications used, I have seen as many as 30 to 50 sessions per processor on a larger multi CPU Server. And still have room to grow.

Check out this awsome product by RTO software to improve Terminal server performance  TScale

Profiles - Local profiles should always be used over roaming profiles. This is a controverial subject, and I will say that roaming profiles can be made to work, however you will have to work hard to make them work well. Local profiles are stored on the local server and therefore provide better performance. Plus, local profiles are more stable and are less likely to become corupt.

Logon Scripts - Large Microsoft NT or AD enterprise corporate environments should use Windows Scripting Host or Kixtart scripting languages. Smaller environments batch files are sufficient and can be made to work well. Kixtart is the best for speed and ease of implementation, and definately my favorite. If you are not a skilled scripter, but need to get the job done, look into www.scriptlogic.com

Application Balancing - Best of breed and Best of balance. Businesses always need the best of breed applications, and systems engineers need to deliver best of breed applications and balance them. What I mean here is, use logic, divide up the user base, from the high end user to the low use end user. Have your high end users, such as management analysts, reporting analysts, those who use alot of CPU utilization on a separate group of MetaFrame or Terminal Servers. And have your normal production users, the low end to medium usage people on a different group of MetaFrame and Terminal Servers. Thus succeeding in providing that balance of "best of breed" applications to the targeted businesses.

These are just a few examples of forward engineering concepts for engineering your environment to be thin. As time allows I will add and grow this section.

Here is an awesome document I found written by Brian Madden for Best Practices. You must register to download it. 

Terminal Server Performance Tuning