Terminal Services Problems

[Kevin]

Hello,

Wondering if someone can point me in the right direction to solve some
terminal services problems. As a business we run multiple terminal servers.
We're running Windows 2003 with about 9 terminal servers.

1st question, the first problem were having is that previous to me being
here, they tried to put the servers in a round robin configuration so when a
users logs on, they would be directed to a random terminal server. They had
several problem implementing that with Windows 2003 server. One question that
did come up was maybe Windows 2003 R2 might overcome this problem. Another
place I worked at they had a Sunfure 5000 that some consulting company
installed that you would first hit the Sunfire then it would hand off the
terminal session to either the Sun box or to the Windows box. Maybe something
has been developed for linux that would also act in this way. Any information
on that would be helpful.

Secondly, I've been looking into a logout script to delete the users files
after they logout of their sessionon the term servers. Right now, we have it
set up so that when they log into a term server, their profile is pulled from
one of the domain controllers. Right now I have to go in and manually delete
the users directory to free up space.

Thanks in advance for any info provided.

Kevin

 

[Jeff Pitsch]

Re: Terminal Services Problems

See inline

Jeff Pitsch
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server
Citrix Technology Professional
Provision Networks VIP

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Kevin wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Wondering if someone can point me in the right direction to solve some
> terminal services problems. As a business we run multiple terminal servers.
> We're running Windows 2003 with about 9 terminal servers.
>
> 1st question, the first problem were having is that previous to me being
> here, they tried to put the servers in a round robin configuration so when a
> users logs on, they would be directed to a random terminal server. They had
> several problem implementing that with Windows 2003 server. One question that
> did come up was maybe Windows 2003 R2 might overcome this problem. Another
> place I worked at they had a Sunfure 5000 that some consulting company
> installed that you would first hit the Sunfire then it would hand off the
> terminal session to either the Sun box or to the Windows box. Maybe something
> has been developed for linux that would also act in this way. Any information
> on that would be helpful.

You could try content switches in front of the server but those can be
quite expensive. You could also try Microsoft Network Load Balancing
which is built into windows. It simply distributes based on network
load not server load or user count. Windows 2008 is coming out with
session based load balancing.

>
> Secondly, I've been looking into a logout script to delete the users files
> after they logout of their sessionon the term servers. Right now, we have it
> set up so that when they log into a term server, their profile is pulled from
> one of the domain controllers. Right now I have to go in and manually delete
> the users directory to free up space.

You can enable group policy to delete profiles at logoff. This would
cause a longer logon as the profile would have to be downloaded
everytime the user logs in. My preference is to use the delprof utility
from Microsoft that you can setup as a scheduled task and tell it to
delete profiles that are older than X days.

>
> Thanks in advance for any info provided.
>
> Kevin