VPN vs. Terminal Services

Ok, I have a dilema that I hope somebody can clue me in on! I work for a company that has two offices in two different cities. We also connect to a third office in another state, which have their own company wide network running VPN with software named Cetrix. Right now we have our network setup in our main office with one Domain on a local server, and our office out of Jackson, MS connects via a DSL connection through Terminal Services. We also have DSL at our main office. All three offices have DSL with a Sonic Firewall (Hardware Firewall). By the way we are running win 2000 PRO with Win 2000 Server on the Server. We have another Server just sitting dormant, not being used. Our IT guy says that we should go to VPN, as we are having connectivity problems. Our Server will just intermittently boot people off of the Termainal Server. Anybody have any suggestion as to what the "ideal" setup is? How we can maximize our equpiment use for the maximum realiability & performance? PLEASE HELP!

How many users do you have in each location accessing what/how much data on which server in each location?

I'd like to know the traffic patterns.

We use Sonicwall brand firewalls/security devices and the additional Sonicwall VPN software. If you're using similar (same brand) devices at different sites you should have VPN communication between the two without any problems.

Basically, I would check to see what VPN capabilities your existing firewalls have. It may just require an extra component purchase from the company.

We have 6 Users in the home office which is directly connected to the Server and 4 users connecting via Terminal Services through DSL in our satellite office, and probably 6 users connecting from our sister company in another state. There is a great amount of data being transferred back and forth, well actually what we use is a Microsoft Office SQL Program, with the front end being installed on each machine locally, and the database which is HUGE being stored on the Server. Of course the terminal services clients are getting everything from the server. The program we use is also a document manager, we are a law firm, so we store tons of docs on the server which we can pull up through our database and view as PDF files.

In your situation I wouldn't recommend a VPN to fix the problem of your terminal server users getting dropped. I would suspect that your connection is being maxed out. You say it's a dsl, what kind? Is it a two way business (same up speed as down) dsl or a 1 way residential (1.4Mbps down but only 125K up)?

I would recommend getting a faster DSL line or T1 at each site and an SLA (service level agreement) from your dsl provider. I can get a T1 now for about $600/month. If you do this you still might want to implement a VPN just for security sake as it's not that expensive to do.

But, before you do anything, look at "when" you are experiencing disconnects. Find out if it's because you have a lot of users maxing out your line or if it's because your provider doesn't have enough bandwidth. If your provider (at any site) doesn't have enough bandwidth you'll see timeouts happening when they get maxed. To test for this run tracert.exe when your experiencing disconnects and look at where you have high ping times. If, after looking at the traces, you find that you have plenty of bandwidth and your ISP is at fault, look for a new ISP and clearly explain your needs for dedicated bandwith.

Implementing a VPN and/or adding bandwidth to your current line won't cure a bloated ISP.

I used to run into this problem with bbnplanet all the time.

Whatever you do, don't change from terminal services. Terminal services and Citrix are a far better solution for what your doing. Anything else would cause you to pull those documents over the dsl. Another thing you might want to look at is local drive and printer mapping. If you have either of these things enabled you may be costing yourself bandwidth and you may have users inadvertantly saving documents to their local machine when they should be saved on the server.