RDC Bandwidth Requirements

Factual Questions
1

I was wondering if anyone could share some insight into what sort of upload capablities are required to support Windows Terminal Services (i.e. Remote Desktops on Win2k3server) over the internet. We’re considering moving our server from a colo with mega-bandwidth to our offices that have only adsl. Most of the time RDC will be used locally from thin clients and laptops, but employees also like to use it from home. So my question is, how much bandwidth per rdc connection might be required to support RDC over the internet?

cheers.

2

meep meep.

3

http://www.brianmadden.com
And a link that address your question more directly:

http://www.brianmadden.com/content/article/Terminal-Server-and-Citrix-MetaFrame-Network-Performance-Troubleshooting-Part-1-of-2
My personal opinion? When I size out a system I still use 64K per client minimum. It’s the old Citrix stock answer, but it seems to work for me. YMMV

edit: you’ll have more luck searching on terminal server or RDP (remote desktop protocol)

4

In my experience, for standard windows applications, TS (RDP) runs very efficiently. I have had users that connected to the company network via dialup (33.6) and had favorable reviews. It wasn’t AS good as connecting in the office, but since it is only screenshots that you are getting from the server, it’s a marked improvement over opening a file via your connection (a 200Mb XLS file will take a long time to come over the dialup, but presents to the RDP session over the LAN very quickly).

da_pope gives the same stats that I’d give for bandwidth planning, but as the numbers go up, you can “share” some of the seats, assuming that you do not have every user possible connecting all the time.