What is Terminal Server?

A. Modern day PC users are used to having a system with large amountsof memory, disk and CPU power to run their applications. This is very differentto UNIX and VMS environments where servers have all the memory, disks and CPUand users have "dumb" terminals which just send keystrokes to theserver which in turn sends back screen updates.

There are a number of advantages with the UNIX/VMS approach. Most desktopcomputers are idle for most of the time with the CPU only 10% busy normally anda significant amount of memory spare, this is a waste of resources. A centralserver approach distributes resource's to sessions as needed, minimizing wasteand ensuring resources are available when needed.

Installing applications and maintaining them on each desktop is very timeconsuming. A central server based install simplifies this significantly andlowers the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Windows NT Terminal Server and Windows 2000 address this with clientsoftware for Windows 9x/NT and Windows for Workgroups machines that allow awindow to be created which allows all processing and execution to be carriedout on the server and the only task the local machine does is to pass backkeyboard and mouse actions. The Terminal Server does all the computation andstorage and passes back screen updates to the client.

Here you can see an example Terminal Server session in its own windows, withits own Start menu and taskbar. All applications in this window are being runon the terminal server. The information shown in Explorer is the Serversdrives, not the local machine.

Obviously Windows NT/95 are operating systems of their own and it may seempointless running terminal server client on these machines however it could beused for application management, install Office 97 on the Terminal Server andall clients use Office via the Terminal Server connection. Imagine runningOffice 97 on a Windows for Workgroups machine!

Communication is via RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) which was designed byMicrosoft.

Windows Terminal Server is based on Citrix's WinFrame product and Citrixprovide a bolt-on, MetaFrame, which adds functionality to Terminal Serverincluding support for DOS, OS/2, Unix, Java and much more.http://www.citrix.com