>Has anyone had experience with running VFP apps under Microsoft Terminal Server?
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>Whilst I think the future for VFP is looking great anyway (I am seeing lots of Visual Basic programmers switching to VFP), this technology looks like it could solve some of the security problems that have haunted us in VFP over the years.
>


VFP and Terminal Server make a great combination. Although I don't know how easy it is to do this in VB, but VFP's lockscreen and memory management functions make it a natural for TSE/Metaframe.


As far a concurrent users go, the blanket answer is "it depends". I have done a lot of Winframe/TSE/Metaframe work in the last 2 years, and the best way to size a server is to actually get your hands on one, start performance monitor (checking CPU, memory, server work queues) and view actual resource usage. In one instance, I have seen apps take 14mb RAM and in others "the same thing" takes 18mb RAM. A decent rule of thumb is 15 users per PentiumPro200 CPU (with 512mb RAM per CPU), but YMMV (eg you will definitely *not* get 30 users per PIII-400 CPU). You will see great performance all around until you hit the nth user and then all sessions seem to "lock up" until the user count drops below n. I also strongly believe it's better from an admin/management/expansion perspective to have 2-3 servers instead of one monster server (load-balancing and failover), but the initial purchase price is higher.


What hurts TSE the most is Microsoft's licensing model for it. I think MS keeps the price artificially high to keep sales of it's fat clients going. They require you to have a Win2k Professional license (~$179) for every system that might connect to your app server, whether they run DOS, 95, NT4, Linux, anything. It's not that big a deal for small installations where it might add a thousand $ to your app's bottom line, but if you try to sell the solution to a large company where the user base is 800 potential user (even if no more than 25 concurrent users), you still have to have 800 Win2kPro CALs. And suddenly it's cheaper for a business to just keep their existing desktop OS instead of doing Terminal Server.....







>How many concurrent users can a server cope with at the present stage of the technology?
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>What are the long term implications for products like SQL Server.
>(Will we want to bother with it if we can handle all our users on the one server)
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>
>How many of you are convinced that the technology will move this way.