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Ending daily Remote Desktop hangs for a pharma manufacturer

Thin-client users faced lag every day and the Remote Desktop server needed a physical restart almost daily, despite powerful hardware. We found the cause, split the load across Proxmox VMs, recovered a failed lab server with no data loss, and moved Tally off a desktop PC.

50–60
users on one Remote Desktop server before
3 VMs
sharing the load after, around 20–22 users each
No data loss
when the failed lab server was restored as a VM
20 users
moved off a desktop PC running Tally

The situation

The company's staff work on NComputing thin clients connected to Remote Desktop servers, with bare-metal database servers for its different units. The server hardware was well specified, yet thin-client users saw slow performance and lag, and the IT team had to physically restart the Remote Desktop server almost every day.

What we found

The hardware was not the problem. All of it had been allocated to a single Windows Server 2022 installation acting as one very large Remote Desktop server. With 50 to 60 people working on it at the same time, it hung.

Before

One oversized Remote Desktop server.

  • All hardware given to one Windows Server 2022 install
  • 50 to 60 users on it at once
  • Lag, hangs and a physical restart almost daily

After

Three Remote Desktop VMs on Proxmox.

  • Resources divided equally between three VMs
  • Around 20 to 22 users per VM
  • The hangs stopped
Same hardware, different design: the load is now shared instead of piled onto one server.

What we changed

We introduced Proxmox VE and, instead of one large Remote Desktop server, provisioned three Remote Desktop VMs with the resources divided equally between them. Each now serves around 20 to 22 users, and the hangs have stopped.

Recovering a critical lab server

The company's LabSolutions database and application server — critical to the lab — ran on bare metal, and at first the client preferred to leave it as it was. When its motherboard failed, we restored it from its Nakivo backup image as a Proxmox VM on another server. LabSolutions came back working with no data loss, at a moment when the lab urgently needed it. It has run on Proxmox since.

Taking Tally off a desktop PC

Tally ran on a desktop PC — an 11th-generation Core i7 with 64 GB of RAM — which was also acting as a Remote Desktop server for 20 thin-client users. It slowed down and hung every day.

  1. Thin clients20 accounts users
  2. General Remote Desktop VMOffice, Chrome, other apps
  3. Tally RemoteAppPublished shortcut
  4. Tally Remote Desktop VMTally only
Users work on one server and open Tally from a published shortcut; Tally itself runs on its own dedicated server.

We built two Windows Server 2022 VMs, both configured for Remote Desktop. One hosts only Tally and publishes it as a RemoteApp; the other hosts Microsoft Office, Chrome and the rest of the users' software. Users sign in to the general server and open Tally from the published shortcut. It now runs smoothly.

The desktop PC no longer carries the accounts department. Those services now run on existing server hardware that had previously been running a single application on bare metal.

Also delivered

  • A central Active Directory with centralised authentication
  • A central file server on a NAS for the accounts team, with saving to local drives blocked so data stays on the NAS
  • Server backups on Proxmox Backup Server

An ongoing partnership

We remain engaged with the company and are migrating its remaining bare-metal servers to Proxmox VMs one at a time. We are now their trusted single IT partner.

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