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Info: My company has a base office in Little Rock and we are setting up a remote office in Virginia with approximately 30 users. We do A LOT of SQL and Oracle data manipulation (heavy processing). The SAN and servers that do this processing will stay in Little Rock.

Now for the question: What would be the ideal way to connect 30 users to the office in Little Rock. I have thought about using VPN -> VDI to give the users access to the necessary resources, that way I don't have queries attempting to run across a VPN. Also what kind of connection would be required to handle that many remote connections (1, 2, possibly 3 T1 lines?). I am nervous about having 30 remote users and all of the sudden there are huge latency problems, disconnects, etc. I really appreciate any and all input. If more info is need I'll be more than happy to provide it.

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I am primarily an advocate for TS for remote access, so these numbers may be a bit high as VDI is supposed to be a bit tighter.

Assume at least a 20 percent overhead on the vpn for a safety margin and say 100 kilobytes a second for each user.

That would translate to two T1s minium, possibly three. The other thing is that the bandwidth usage for these remote access products is asymmetric. You could easily go with a lower to mid range cable connection if you can find one with acceptable SLA and latency requirements.

The other variable is the background traffic crossing your connection. File shares, printers, windows updates, etc. In my experience if you can get two or three local servers at your second site this will address most these issues. The biggest thing I had a problem with was WSUS and AV updates. Having a local repository for those services really helped.

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  • This is exactly the information I was looking for thank you very much. I do have a couple of questions on the post. First, You mentioned you are an advocate for TS. What benefits would we see if we used TS over VDI. I know the main differences between the two, but is there something that makes one faster/more reliable, or is it more of a preference of management? Secondly, would it be better to get 3 T1 pipes or just go ahead and jump to a single T2 pipe. The question being is it better to have 3 lines for traffic or 1 big one, or does it matter? Thank you again you have been a HUGE help!
    – msindle
    Feb 14, 2012 at 7:07
  • I am a major vmware person myself, however most of my coworkers have been windows admins. I haven't used a T2. When my needs have reached that point in the past I advocated for fiber. Feb 14, 2012 at 20:03

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