Lesson 1

Terminal Services is an optional component of Microsoft Windows 2000 Server that delivers the Windows 2000 desktop and Windows-based applications to remote computers and devices. Terminal Services is ideal for making line-of-business applications available to mobile users, branch offices, or Windows-based terminals. Because all application and data processing takes place on the server, clients do not require significant amounts of RAM or processing power. Therefore, Terminal Services can help an organization reduce the total cost of ownership by using existing client hardware and lower-cost equipment. One of the major improvements of the Windows 2000 Terminal Server is that it is integrated with the Windows 2000 operating system. If you had the opportunity to run the Terminal Server edition of Windows NT 4.0, you realized that the Terminal Server components were just an add-in product. Because the Windows 2000 Terminal Server is a part of the operating system, service packs for Windows 2000 will include fixes for the Terminal Server components as well. The Windows 2000 Terminal Server also has improved client-side caching, load balancing, and enhanced administrative tools .

The Windows 2000 Terminal Server improves the way images are cached on the client computer, which improves the user's perceived performance of their Terminal session. The cached images are retained from session to session, which enhances performance, the cache does not have to be rebuilt after each Terminal session.

Unfortunately, the type of load balancing isn't related to clustering or fail over. However, the Windows 2000 Terminal Server will assign new sessions to the least busy Terminal Server, thus distributing the terminal load in a more equitable fashion, which improves the overall performance for all users.