Is anyone using WAAS to compress Remote Desktop/Terminal Services traffic?

[olighec]

I am not sure if this is the correct forum in which to answer this, but it seems more are talking about WAAS in here than the WAN forum.

I am the network administrator for a company which operates a main office with our central datacenter, plus several remote offices, most with 1-2 people and one with 6. The remote workers use VMWare VDM to access their virtual desktops which are hosted at our datacenter in the home office. VDM uses MS Remote Desktop as the transport protocol. They connect to the home office with a Lan2Lan IPSec tunnel.

We are having problems where the remote users will become disconnected from their sessions at seemingly random times and have traced it to a lack of bandwidth here at the home office. It is not an option for us to increase the bandwidth, so we need to look at reducing the amount of bandwidth the VDM sessions require.

Is that something the WAAS appliance can do? I noticed TCP acceleration was an option, but it did not directly mention RDP session acceleration like other devices such as the Expand Networks Accelerators.

Thanks,

Chris

[dstolt]

Chris,

As long as you can get to the traffic before your IPSec encryption, RDP can be accelerated by WAAS. However, if compression and encryption is being used on the RDP client/server connection, it will be less effective. To get the maximum compression with WAAS, set server encryption to low (only encrypt login) and disable compression on the client .RDP file. WAAS has the ability to compress RDP more then it's built-in compression and TCP optimizations should allow you to get better utilization on the WAN link.

Hope that helps,

Dan