Installation guide

28 Implementing Windows Terminal Server and Citrix MetaFrame on IBM ^ xSeries Servers
4.1 Small WTS and MetaFrame environment
A customer wanted to install a Windows Terminal Server and Citrix MetaFrame for 20 users at
a single location. The customer had a mixture of older computers that did not have the
capacity to run Windows 2000 or Windows XP. The customer wanted to reuse these
computers by converting them to thin clients and using WTS. All users will run applications
such as those in the Microsoft Office suite. The customer also wanted the ability to remotely
control users’ desktops and to minimize the amount of end-user training with a thin-client
environment.
The solution was to use Windows Server 2003 and Citrix MetaFrame XPa. MetaFrame XPa
was chosen because the customer did not expect to install an additional server in the short
term. The thin clients were a mixture of DOS clients and published applications to existing
Windows 9X clients. TCP/IP was used as the network protocol.
Our choice for this customer was to run Windows Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame on
an xSeries 335 (x335). The customer did not expect significant growth in the short term and
cost constraints prohibited installing an extra processor. The x335 has sufficient performance
for this small Citrix network to provide Microsoft Office applications. Given that all users
connected to MetaFrame via a 100 Mbps Ethernet network, no bandwidth sizing was
necessary.
Using our memory formula, we calculated that we needed a minimum of 428 MB of RAM. The
customer wanted to run backup and restore and virus protection software, so another 32 MB
of RAM was required, for a total of 460 MB of memory. The server comes standard with 512
MB of memory which met our memory requirements with an additional 10% for headroom.
The x335 also allows the customer to fit an extra processor if a greater workload is placed on
the system in the future.
Looking at what software and data should be on the server, we made the following
recommendations:
򐂰 The Citrix server should not hold any user data, only the applications to be published to
your users. In our example, the Citrix server was installed with the customer’s applications,
which included Office XP and Lotus Notes. 16-bit and DOS applications should not be
installed on Windows Terminal Server due to their increased system requirements and the
possible system instability that they may cause.
򐂰 The x335 is fitted with an integrated RAID adapter. The disk requirements were met by two
32 GB, 15,000 RPM drives, configured as a RAID-1 logical drive. In the event of an
Ethernet adapter failure, the two onboard Ethernet adapters were logically teamed so that
if an adapter fails, the network connectivity is not affected.