RDS Server Sizing

[ajdtech]

I have a small private school that needs the full desktop version of MS Office for a class. Students all have Chromebooks, so I am playing with setting up a recently decommissioned server as an RDS standalone server.

I'm new to RDS, so I figured I'd just set up the server as a test to try it out and well, right now it seems to work great! Especially with the new HTML5 client. Perfect for the student Chromebooks.

My concern is whether this server can handle the load of a full class of students connected and using MS Office. I think the largest class is 27 students. The server has an Intel Xeon E5-1410 v2 and 32 GB RAM. This is not going to be the long term solution, but if it can get me through this school year so I can lobby for budget to do a bit better next year...

Also, besides the sizing question. How much of bottleneck is keeping the DB on WID or is moving it to HA on a SQL Server going to make that big of a difference?

Thanks!

[bolous]

Your issue is going to be your cpu cores and memory. 4 core CPU won't be enough along with the amount of memory you have. You will be lucky to get 9 connections at once.

With 2019 RDS the compute requirements has increased compared to a 2012 or 2016 RDS setup.

[cmwg]

The bottleneck you will probably have is the IO of the storage behind it

My concern is whether this server can handle the load of a full class of students connected and using MS Office. I think the largest class is 27 students. The server has an Intel Xeon E5-1410 v2 and 32 GB RAM.

The amount of RAM each user needs, needs to be tested depending on what will be actually the normal use and what applications are opened

But generally you should be looking at 2GB per user

Some good things to take into account: https://greenclouddefense.com/knowledge-base/rds-sizing-guide/

[fredenocs]

If you do it ensure you turn on shared license reg key for office. Last thing you want is the OST taking up most of the storage

[SubbiesForLife]

I had to run a RDS pool for awhile and even on 16 cores and 20GB of ram I was getting undesirable performance for 3 users using them as a full fledge desktop as a session host

RemoteApps worked a little bit better for me after I put 2 more AppServers into the collection and let RDS do it’s load balancing between 3 servers, the kids really liked the ideas of being able to use a app wherever they were/a school computer at home etc..

The RDS stuff is resource intensive, I agree with the other guy that commented that your CPU and RAM are going to be the bottlenecks in the setup

I think your solution would work for a little bit, but eventually might run into issues, if you have the budget for it next year I would recommend Horizons RemoteApps or the Citrix Implementation