Terminal Services on VB 3.0 Versus VMware esx 4.0

[lespaul20]

I have attempted to run Terminal Services on VirtualBox about 9 months ago with less than stellar performance. We ended up moving away from it due to performance issues. Has there been any testing that has shown considerable performance increases with SMP and Windows servers? How does is compare to esx 4.0 strictly in terms of performance? I plan on testing but I don't have the capacity to do it right now and I'm looking for other people's experience.

TS - Windows 2003 32bit 4GB RAM 20 concurrent users(CPU was our bottleneck at the time).
Host was a X4150 dual quad core with 8GB ram.

[TerryE]

VBox 3.0 is just out of beta, so I very much doubt that WTS has been given a try by anyone yet. I would stick with ESX until at least 3.0.4 or even 3.2 comes out -- IMHO.

[vbox4me2]

You must be doing something odd then since I have RDP running like its a real machine, I even moved my work desktop over some time ago, apart from the taskbar appearing at the top when the mouse is there, I'd almost forget its rdp.

[TerryE]

Yup, maybe so but the OP's Q wasn't about RDP, but about using a 20-user Windows Terninal Server solution. Supporting this load profile needs an SMP config with solid reliability. Vbox 3.0 is too soon for such a production application.

[vbox4me2]

I've done it with 2.08 and at the moment 322 users spread over one quadcore with 4 loadbalanced TS editions running in paralel hooked to an AD over darkfiber with extended radius athentication. Smp is nice but you don't need it.

[TerryE]

OK but running TS in one core is very vulnerable to compute-bound processes as you have all of your eggs in one basket. I can imaging applications where you could get this to work very well -- for example if you are running a set of captive apps that you contol, but when the TS sessions are running say an Office automation mix then I could see that you could end up with a lot of frustrated users.

[vbox4me2]

Redundency is easy with this, no complaints yet with Oracle 10 fin, SAP r3 and office stuff, there are about 80 users simultanious during the day, databases are on the other DF side though.