Users or Sessions in Windows Server 2016

[ratoque]

Hello,

We have customer with a more than 300 users (sessions) in a windows server 2016 with Terminal Services, and they would like to use TSPLUS instead what are he main recommendations in terms of configuration parameters, access mode, in Tsplus to get the best performance?

Some people said that Tsplus in not fine for more than 50 Users/sessions.

Some days ago they installed Tsplus and with the first 50 users the system became very slow to open a new session.

Attached the server performance with 232 sessions working (with Terminal services)

Thanks a lot for your value feedback and experience.

[admin]

Hello,

Having 300 users on a RDS server is very rare and some serious tweaking are necessary to achieve this.
I would definitely not recommend to have such a great amount of users on a TSplus server because there are multiple Windows ressources limitation that may block your production and create a bottleneck such as network bandwidth, graphical memory, page file handling etc...

When deploying TSplus on a large scale with big hardware the best solution in my opinion is to virtualize your server with 50-100 users per virtual machines depending on your users environment.

You will find all basic information regarding TSplus prerequisites here : https://www.terminalserviceplus.com/docs/pre-requisites

What is important to keep in mind, is that your server's performance will mostly depend on these criteria :

The amount of memory used by your published application, some applications requires more memory than others.
The percentage of CPU used by your published application, some applications requires more CPU than others.
Fast disk access, this is also important to consider if your application needs to write a lot of data, especially if more than 50 users are connected simultaneously.
The amount of GDI/Users objects used by your published application. Some application may cause servers to hang because of this Windows limitation that is not dependent of hardware resource, more information about this can be found here : http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinov ... 15174.aspx

You can check these by opening a task manager and click on the process tab, use the display feature to add GDI and User objects.

[ratoque]

Thanks Oliver for your answer,
The issue is that the main application to publish needs to run in the same server (not very common) and the customer is working right now with this server Windows server 2016 using Terminal services and it is fine for him in terms of performance, so the main question is if I uninstall Terminal services and Install TSPLUS what would be expected in terms of performance? could be better, equal or worst, What are the mains issues to take into account using TSPLUS in this situation?

Thanking in advance.

[admin]

Hello,

That is hard to tell because I do not know the application you wish to publish and the environment you want to provide to your users (redirected devices / network drives for shared folder / redirected folders / logon scripts / GPO / printers). All of that can play a role in overall performance. For a heavy duty server with such a large amount of users, I would recommend reducing the above to the maximum and publish only the unique application that is really needed for your users. I would not recommend you to remove your RDS role to test TSplus in this case as this could endanger your production.

We had some performance issues in the past with Windows server 2016 but it has been fixed by Microsoft mostly and enhanced by our team also. The main concern with 2016 is when you publish a full remote desktop, after 15 users do log in a black screen would occur because explorer.exe would hang. This issue does not occur with RDS role installed. As a workaround, we developed an alternate shell that applies for people assigning a full remote desktop when TSplus is installed on Windows 2016.

For your information this issue does not occur anymore with 2019 which has shown great performance with TSplus so far.

[ratoque]

Thanks a lot for your answer Oliver, let me understand with the latest version of Windows 2016 and latest version of TSPLUS the problem described after 15 users was solved?

[admin]

Hello,

It is solved by using Winxshell, which is set automatically for users and groups with the remote desktop assigned. If that is not the case because you assigned the remote taskbar / application panel / floating panel or if you publish a unique application then you are not concerned by this issue.