I am currently running Windows Server 2008 on a system comprising of: Intel Core2 2.4GHz 8GB DDR2 64GB SSD O/S Drive 128GB SSD Data drive
My users connect via RDP and process everything on the servers (4 in total).
How many users could I have per server to maximise the usage of hardware whilst not hindering performance?
Users do not have access to the O/S, nor do they use email or browse the web. They can only access specific areas of our software package which isn't particularly memory hungry.
Any advice would be great. Thanks
When using Remote Desktop there are 2 types of overhead you need to be aware of, firstly that of the application(s) the users are running, which you say is quite minimal. You need to consider how many instances of this application you think your server could handle running side by side.
Secondly is the resource use of terminal services itself running the user session, so the resources used by explorer, by keeping the users interactions with the server separated from other users etc.
Its difficult to give an estimate of how many users it could cope with, without some figures. I would suggest that you actually need to do some testing. Get some users on there, monitor their resource use, see how the server is performing, then increase the load, check again until you get to a point you can benchmark as optimal.