how to handle many vista/seven users

[kokodin]

Hello i have a little bit of mess with my network again.
Everything work ok up to the point when half of my bigger classroom start to login . There is about 20 pc's and all of them are windows vista buisness
server runs at core 2 duo e7300 with 4gb of ddr2 ram in dual channel and at the point of 10 pc loged in it is 100% bussy all the time. any more users simply cant do anything and loging in jams network completly
I enabled on my server roaming profiles and folder redirection, but it could work with either one of them alone i think. So witch of those services is more resource-jammer, becouse i must disable one of them to allow a normal school work ?
What kind of server should i build to enable them both and they to work eficiently?

[christian]

I understand what "roaming profile" is but I've no clue about "folder redirection"    Could you please elaborate on this ?
When your system is locked or performing very slowly, did you look at some figures like memory and CPU usage?
Are you suffering because of I/O wait or is it something occurring at network level ?

[kokodin]

folder redirection is a gpo thing. it synchronize desktop and other redirected folders (in my case my documents, app data and desktop) and it moves between windows versions, so xp and vista workstations, have the same files on the same profiles. Profile itself is roaming profile, so settings are stored on server for every user (xp and vista separately) and not on workstations.

I check cpu load with top on server after users actually loged in, not when they were  in "welcome" stage of login but after desktops were loaded. (and with 20 users it can take up to 30 minutes to load all profiles, classes are in 45 minutes blocks)

Network communication is working ok, renewing workstation (13gb of data) via clonezilla is taking about 30 minutes for 100mbit network from any point when there is no trafic (10 for 1gigabit, server have one gigabit adapter, but there are no gigabit switches in my network)

I can think only of two thing that actually can clog network like that
1 is slow server hardware (2 core is too few or sata2 harddrive speed)
2 100mnit network could be to slow, for 15 and up simultaneous login

if that make any difference i still use 32 bit zentyal 3.0 and all windows boxes are 32 bit also

[christian]

32bit vs. -'bit will not make any difference in term of performance.
While you were looking at top, did you notice any I/O wait ?
You said you looked at CPU load but, unless I'm wrong, you do not describe what you saw  On the other hand, it looks like you're convinced this is a network related issue.
You may try to add one more 100mb network car on server and bind it with the existing one... but this will help only if you are facing network bottleneck and if result is to move from 30 minutes to 15 minutes, result might still not be acceptable.

[kokodin]

to be honest i don't know how to check i/o wait yesterday. When i launch top i only knew how to read cpu usage and that most of it goes to root process. (windows thinking, without ui i cant do anything :] )
so i read how to read top and now i can tell that 15 xp users generate 50 % cpu use right now with i/o wait at 1-5% level and they are one switch closer to the server than vsta workstations
also server practically eats all of ram leaving only 300mb free out of 4 gb
I will check it again when vista classroom start to complain

[christian]

I'm glad you learned something instead of waiting for forum to provide you with the answer 
If you are already short in term of memory, don't be surprised if it goes slower with additional connections.
This will most likely result in some swapping thus I/O wait thus high CPU load mainly due to this "wait" status.

To be confirmed next time you look at this. This means that additional memory could solve your issue, hopefully 
How much ? I don't know 

[kokodin]

ok i got a "full house" or classroom and top does not look much different
us is oscilating 50-60% sy 20% ni 0% with 27% spikes id 10-25% and wa as before 0-1% with up to 7% spikes
memoory usage does not jump much i still have about 200 mb free and swap uses only 90mb from its 1gb
eth1 use from dashboard grapf is oscilating around 300kb rx and spiking 0,2-2mb for tx. and that's about it nothing i can tell from that other than i run out of ram and cpu :]

is adding aditional zential box as aditional domain controller good idea?

[astana]

In my school I've got 3 computer labs (roughly 16 computers per lab), plus around 40 other PC's connected to my zentyal server.
You'll find your network will be choking if it's running 100Mb/s.
Install iotop,atop and slurm to see what is happening with your IO. Monitorix is also a nice package that can give you a good overview of your server, but read up on how it uses mySQL with Zentyal storage.
As already said, you're a bit light on RAM.
My Zentyal server is 16Gb RAM with a core i5 (can't remember exact spec), and the CPU's really are idle a lot, but our network is 1Gb/s throughout. I'm currently getting some slowdown when all 3 labs are running, but this is expected as proxy/redirected folders and roaming profiles are all coming from 1 machine.
I'm in the process of setting up a NAS that integrates with Zentyal (really easy btw) to free up a lot of bandwidth and disk bottlenecks.

The big problem you'll face once you get your server specced right will be your network throughput, no matter how many server boxes you add.
10MB/s is very little by modern standards.

The fact you're seeing 300KB/2MB rx/tx shows you've probably got network issues. On a lowly P4 test NAS with gigabit I can push 550Mb/s. Investigate your network 1st, Server Specs 2nd, then think of strategies of offloading work from you domain controller (proxy elsewhere, redirected folders elsewhere etc)

[kokodin]

call me stupid but it might be my fault all together
our school have antivirus licence for ArcaVir antivirus software one licence for entire school and i installed a copy of that antivirus on every workstation making them work a little bit slugish
today i uninstalled it from one of vista workstations and it resulted in super smooth and super fast network login of my profile (4-20 secound compared to 1 minute before) Same with loging out. It might be that antivirus installed on workstations was the culprit?
how much protection for windows end users give zentyal integrated antivirus?