Hi, I'm learning and looking for best practices on setting up a new RDS farm. We are planning on Migrating from a Win2003 Citrix 4.5 farm but believe that RDS will provide the functionally that we require so we are opting not to upgrade our Citrix licensing at this time. The technology appears to be very different than what I am used to so I have some questions.
We have a VMWare 5.1 Essentials plus kit and Datacenter windows licensing.
The application that will be running is saying 10 applications per CPU Core, and 250MB ram for each instance is recommended. We have anywhere from 70-170 concurrent connections but it's typically around 100.
I also need secure access from the internet and uptime is extremely important. This application (EMR) is not known for stability.
I also need the ability for pass-through printing for users. The application stores printer defaults so I'm hoping the printer name doesn't change by adding a session number like citrix does. We do not have a print server and all network printers are installed as local on the clients. Should I use this opportunity to deploy a print server or two as well? Will i have driver issues or does RDS have a UPD driver like citrix does?
I am going to assume all windows 7 or higher clients since our XP clients should be phased out by the time this goes live.
My plan is to build (and re-build if need be) a functional environment and do a lot of testing before migrating users over, but I need to be ready by mid-January.
What is the best setup as far as how many VM's I should configure?
I am thinking 4-6 VM's with 8GB ram and two cores (which I will increase if needed), Using session mode.
Installing connection broker on two of the session host VM's with RR DNS to them. A web access server with RD Gateway also installed.
Can the connection broker's serve applications? Should the RD gateway be separate from the web access server?
What is the best way to deploy the application when I am ready? Should i push it out with remoteapp/GP or give users access to the web access server? In that case would i need two web access servers for reliability?
Help me plan out this build. Also if you know of any step by step guides for R2 i would appreciate it.
Thanks!
