thin clients & terminal services

depends on the # of terminals your'll run, how many will access the application at one time [demand on server or servers].

terminal services works great in an MD office with a special MD app program and maybe 4 to 5 terminals using TCP/IP or when you have super sensitive data that you don't want reg users getting into like on a database server, but when you get to larger #s of terminals and larger # of concurrent connections, performance starts to suffer. then its having to allocate bandwidth to users, maybe add some more servers to spread the load around. Can get expensive in server hardware and the having to manage it all the time. If users just generate paper using Word or Excel, saving to a file server, better to go just connecting with a PC to the domain.

Downside is that if TS goes down or has application problems everyone goes down and/or has application problems.

Again, as you mentioned, the benefit is that there is only one machine that need to be kept up to date with patches and updates rather than all the client machines you would normally have. The life cycle of client machines is extended almost indefinitely.

In my opinion using a TS and thin clients is a very good Idea. If everything is set up correctly there isn't any need for too much network bandwidth and the speed is still ok, as in normal cases you only need to transfer keyboard, mouse and display between server and clients. A further advantage is that it is easier to keep up high security standards, as the normal clients won't have the rights to change too much on the server and they can't install software by themselves. When compared to a normal server and a TS, if they crash, you wouldn't be able to do too much if a normal server is down either, as the data will be on the server anyway. You could even cluster your server, so if one goes down the other would still be running.

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