x64 Published Desktop, in the x64 Terminal Server / Citrix forum on BrianMadden.com

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jtuk Posted: 10-29-2008 6:53 AM

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Hi,

We are currently evaluating moving our published desktop to a 64 bit PS 4.5 (or maybe 5) and I had some questions based on other people's experiences and what we have seen so far.

To give you some background we currently have a published desktop to just over 5,000 users using Citrix PS4 and Windows 2003 Standard 32 bit. Installed on the servers we have Office 2003, SAP, and a few other tools such as WinZip, IBM Document Manager etc. Over the past year we have noticed that memory usage on the current architecture has been going up leading to large amounts of paging. This in turn has meant less users per server and so more servers.

Our initial testing has been with Dell2950's with Dual Quad Core 3GHz procs with 32GB Ram and have not gone that well. So far with just over 100 users (simulated with EdgeSight for Load Testing) we start to see major failures. Outlook for example crashes every time, new log-ons start to take a very long time and the system CPU usage appears to be almost at 100%. This seems a very low number of users.

One of the other things we have done is tried using the 32 bit explorer shell to resolve some of the problems of compatibility (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/895561/en-us). Has anyone else tried this in a x64 bit environment?

Also we think that we will end up using 32 bit IE due to flash / java limitations. Again has anyone seen major issues with this?

I think what I am really trying to get at is that we will run almost exclusively 32-bit applications (other than SAP Client), and reading around people say that this uses anything from 1.1 to 1.8 more memory than running these on a 32-bit platform. Am really after anyone’s real life experiences who has actually done this, And are there any other major issues with running so many 32 bit applications on a 64 bit box?

The other solution we are looking at is moving to Enterprise to increase memory availability. Again has anyone much to say about this (other than licensing costs are much higher)?

Thanks,

Jonathan

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Alan Osborne replied on 10-30-2008 1:27 AM

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For what it's worth, I prefer to run CPS 4.5 32-bit VMs on top of VMware VI3 (ESX 3.5). User density per physical server is better and you can scale out rather than scale up. This approach avoids the issues with 64-bit CPS and likewise avoids the problems with 32-bit Windows when user counts climb. Also, if you license for Windows Server 2003 Enterprise, you can legally run up to 4 VMs with that license. With Data Center, you can run as many VMs as you like.