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Testing Pre-Production Servers Accurately?
An anonymous reader asks: "Having been granted a 90-day demo enclosure of new blade servers from a major vendor the question I find myself asking is: On a limited budget, how does one simulate 1000+ attached clients and the activity of those clients? We're a K-12 school district and our current servers don't keep up with all the roaming-profile abuse from our Windows workstations. Are there tools or tricks available to simulate load on Netware/Linux servers? The user groups around here usually answer this question with 'Get some workstations for a test lab!', there's got to be a less expensive option, right? Can we leverage our existing client populous to achieve our goal, without interrupting or changing the quality of service at the desktop, substantially?"
So why not just point each user's "My Documents" folder to a network share? This will keep the profile much smaller. I guess I just took it for granted that this was a standard practice. I've done it for years.
So why not just point each user's "My Documents" folder to a network share?
Because most admins, > 60%, don't RTFM and therefore are unaware that the My Documents folder can be redirected through the use of Group Policy. Even more admins, > 80%, don't know that the IE cache directory should also be redirected to prevent multimeg profiles due to browser cache.
Of course, even those admins, that go to the trouble of doing these things and many more to minimized the profile size, are torpedoed by the users that save their downloads and documents to their desktops. I even saw an admin with a Windows 2000 service pack(>120MB) saved to his desktop while using roaming profiles.
The fact is that the roaming profile implementation is crap! Nothing should be copied over the network at login. Everything should be stored on a network drive and accessed directly from there. This is how Unix does it with remotely mounted Home directories. That way files don't cross the network if you don't access them. If you want to implement caching for slow links or disconnected access as Windows does, that's fine, but copying everything over the wire everytime someone logs in is just stupid.