- Oct 23, 2000
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I have a small business client that currently has a few people working from home. Because of the nature of the software that they use, the program has to be running in the office (it's a network bandwidth hog and does not play nice over VPN) so they are using VNC to connect to a couple of older XP Pro desktop machines that are tucked in a corner of their server room. It works OK, but the client wants to update and streamline things, and get rid of the old power hungry desktops.
I have an idea to manage this but I'd like some input and suggestions on how to do it (or ways to do it different/better).
The client is also preparing to replace their very old dual P4 Xeon server running SBS 2003 with a new and much faster server running Server 2008 or Server 2012 (depending on whether compatibility issues with their office software and Server 2012 get resolved soon). They only have the one server and it really only serves as a domain controller and file server. He is not interested in paying the relatively high extra cost to purchase a Terminal Server license (plus the ridiculous extra fees that the office management software charges for running on a Terminal Server).
I'm wondering if it would be feasible to run multiple virtual machines on the new server (with a desktop OS - either XP Pro or Win7 Pro) and let the remote users connect directly to those VMs to do their work. The software they use is not resource intensive at all. They almost never use more than 1GB of RAM total even with the management software, Outlook, Word, and many company web pages open, and the CPU usage is almost zero the majority of the time.
Another option would be to get one powerful new desktop machine and run the VMs there, but I suspect it will be easier to manage multiple VMs in a true server environment.
Apart from the need to add sufficient RAM to the server so that enough RAM can be dedicated to the 3 or 4 desktop VMs without affecting the performance of the server itself, I can't think of any potential issues with this solution. Please let me know if I'm missing anything that could cause problems.
I have an idea to manage this but I'd like some input and suggestions on how to do it (or ways to do it different/better).
The client is also preparing to replace their very old dual P4 Xeon server running SBS 2003 with a new and much faster server running Server 2008 or Server 2012 (depending on whether compatibility issues with their office software and Server 2012 get resolved soon). They only have the one server and it really only serves as a domain controller and file server. He is not interested in paying the relatively high extra cost to purchase a Terminal Server license (plus the ridiculous extra fees that the office management software charges for running on a Terminal Server).
I'm wondering if it would be feasible to run multiple virtual machines on the new server (with a desktop OS - either XP Pro or Win7 Pro) and let the remote users connect directly to those VMs to do their work. The software they use is not resource intensive at all. They almost never use more than 1GB of RAM total even with the management software, Outlook, Word, and many company web pages open, and the CPU usage is almost zero the majority of the time.
Another option would be to get one powerful new desktop machine and run the VMs there, but I suspect it will be easier to manage multiple VMs in a true server environment.
Apart from the need to add sufficient RAM to the server so that enough RAM can be dedicated to the 3 or 4 desktop VMs without affecting the performance of the server itself, I can't think of any potential issues with this solution. Please let me know if I'm missing anything that could cause problems.