Newforma has noticed an increase in the use of Terminal Servers in our customer base over the last year or two.  The use of terminal servers is a great way to provide remote users with a LAN experience as well as reduce I.T. burden of supporting individual laptops in the field.  However, because the Terminal Server often serves multiple users in various organizations, each with different software requirements, ALL of the software titles required by the users must be installed on a single server.  This fact leads to an increased possibility of conflicts, especially when it comes to program extensions and plug-ins for a common application.

With that said, Newforma would LOVE to hear your experiences with Terminal Servers, including (but not limited to):

    • Best Practices
    • Known conflicts between other applications and Newforma
      (specifically the Newforma plug-in for Outlook)
    • Best appliances
    • What not to do
    • Etc.

We have a Terminal Server running Windows 2003 Enterprise and Newforma installed with Office 2007 SMB.

No reported issues yet.

Even with one crazy remoting into it from an iPad.

We are in the early stages of rolling out Citrix to provide remote Revit instances for facilitating working on projects amongst our various office locations.  This has been some discussion about other applications that might leverage this setup, but for now it’s limited to Revit.  I’ll try and remember to come back here and post NPC experience if we end up adding that to the mix.

We have been using Newforma Project Center Eighth Edition in a Microsoft Remote Desktop Session Host farm (Windows Server 2008 R2) for several months now.

Office 2010, Newforma Project Center, and several other applications are accessed almost exclusively as remote applications on two farm member servers by as many as 100 concurrent users.

Installation and integration with Office 2010 has been trouble-free, and system response is good.

We have noted that Project Center can be a bit of a memory hog at times, taking up to a gigabyte for a single instance, but generally hovers between 75MB and 250MB per instance.

We’ve not yet noted any operational issues with Newforma, though there is a mild operational point of which to be aware:  If ever a user wishes to log out of the RDSH server completely, after closing the NFPC application window, they need to make sure to also right click on the Newforma icon in the System Tray and select Exit.  Without the extra step, the user’s desktop session remains open and active, preventing the user from starting a new session.

Our farm currently consists of two Dell PowerEdge R300 servers, each maxed with one quad-core Xeon processor and 24GB memory.  A separate virtual server runs the Remote Desktop Connection Broker service and Remote Desktop Licensing Server exclusively.  For our current user count and installed applications, we find we’re hitting the top of our comfort level with the capacity of the current hardware.  To address current concerns and provide room for growth, we’ll probably be upgrading the farm in the next several months to Dell PowerEdge R610 servers with dual six-core processors and 96GB memory.