Benchmarks Microsoft Terminal Services

A Terminal Server allows remote client devices to access and use Windows server desktops and applications over a TCP/IP connection.  A user’s applications are executed on the server and the virtual desktop is transmitted across the network to the client device.

Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition¹ with Terminal Server enabled, breaks the barrier imposed by the predecessor x86², 32-bit architecture, for scaling up the number of terminal server users.  Furthermore, the x64 edition effectively runs 32-bit legacy applications without emulation in addition to newer 64-bit applications.

A Unisys ES7000/one Enterprise Server with Terminal Server enabled and Windows Server 2003 x64 exceeds previous Windows x86 limits with a 4-processor configuration and further scales up with 8-processors while running the Knowledge Worker workload.  A Unisys ES7000/one Enterprise Server with Terminal Server can support up to 710 Knowledge Workers which is more than twice the number that can be supported on an x86 Windows system. The ES7000/one Enterprise Server can operate at a higher processor utilization level than commodity servers while still providing the same amount of processing headroom per server.

¹Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions require x64 processors.  x64 allows x86 32-bit applications to run natively.  x64 processors have 64-bit extensions.  x64 and 64-bit are interchangeable in this paper.
² 86 is an architecture and a hardware platform that uses 32-bit addressing.  x86 Windows refers to any version of Windows that runs on an x86 platform and thus uses 32-bit addressing.  x86 and 32-bit are interchangeable in this paper.