Terminal Service Plus

Anyone give me their experience of using Hyper-V running Server 2008 VM's? I will eventually need to allow 500 users to access the TSPlus servers but find very little info on how many sessions the VM's and TSPlus can handle. I did find one article that did show CPu's/Mem/user but it didn't say if is was VM's or physical servers.

I'm using 20 Citrix server that are VM's which easily handles 500 plus users all day. Looking at some test servers running TSPlus and having 10 people logged and testing I'm seeing a much higher use of the memory for each TSPlus server. All users are running the same apps in test and in production. I see a 2 to 1 use of memory. Our Citrix Farm with 50 users logged only uses about 5gig using the same apps where TSPlus 10 users are using about 2.5 gig of memory.

Any suggestions or am I asking to much from TSPlus to handle 500 users? I would like to keep my farm small like I have with Citrix 12 servers but I have a feeling I'll have to add a lot more VM's to handle the work load?

Thanks

Harold

Hi Harold.
I'm running about 70 connections on one 2012R2. Depending on the resource demand of your application, that sets the final restrictions. I could probably run 100 connections without any problems, since the users are only using a single application, which is light on resources.
My server is a 32GB, 16core VM. Each connection requires about 40MB when logged in and 55MB with application loaded. With extra overhead from a couple of users and a MSSQL database of about 8GB that made it too difficult to run on 16GB, so I upgraded about a month ago to 32GB.
Check the exact resource usage with Process Explorer. There's no difference in cpu/mem/users for physical/virtual - it's the same amount of resources each user will reserve.
Can you tell a bit more about your setup? What's the current memory usage in test/production for a user running the same thing? How many physical servers do you have?

hansen wrote:Hi Harold.
I'm running about 70 connections on one 2012R2. Depending on the resource demand of your application, that sets the final restrictions. I could probably run 100 connections without any problems, since the users are only using a single application, which is light on resources.
My server is a 32GB, 16core VM. Each connection requires about 40MB when logged in and 55MB with application loaded. With extra overhead from a couple of users and a MSSQL database of about 8GB that made it too difficult to run on 16GB, so I upgraded about a month ago to 32GB.
Check the exact resource usage with Process Explorer. There's no difference in cpu/mem/users for physical/virtual - it's the same amount of resources each user will reserve.
Can you tell a bit more about your setup? What's the current memory usage in test/production for a user running the same thing? How many physical servers do you have?

Thanks for the reply Hansen and sorry for getting back so late.
I have 6 2012 Hyper-V core servers and I have spread out 12 2008 TSP VM guest between my 6 core Hyper-V servers.
Each TSP guest VM has 4 virtual CPU's and 5gig of virtual ram. As of now I have about 30 users per guest VM ,memory usage is about 75% used. So far everything seems to be doing fine and I do see a little bit of performance gain by moving my Core Hyper-V servers to Win 2012 from Win 2008..