A local business I support has been given a nice Sunfire X4140 - 2 SAS drives, 48 GB RAM. Since their old Windows 2003 server is on its last legs (with Microsoft ending support) I was planning to use the Sunfire as their new terminal server. They have between 10 and 20 users on the existing Windows server at any one time, mostly doing word processing and spreadsheets, so the move to Linux won't be hugely disruptive. They use Softmaker Office on Windows, and I have tested the trial version on Linux and it works nicely.

My only fear is that the server doesn't have the graphics horsepower to drive multiple terminal server sessions. As far as I can make out it has very limited onboard video memory - perhaps even as low as 32 MB, although I can't find the exact spec. What I'm wondering is, does a VNC or x2go client connecting to the server use the graphics memory of the server or the graphics memory of the local PC?

The server has riser boards for PCI-express cards, so I presume I could install a low-end 256 MB or 512 MB video card if push came to shove? I'm not familiar with enterprise-grade servers but this gift to the business was too good to pass up so I would like to use it to its full potential.

what terminals?

They're all Windows 7 PCs. I can't change that because they have bespoke software running on them which the vendor will support only on Windows.

I haven't decided whether to use VNC or x2go; the latter is nice but I've had it randomly locking up on occasion. VNC is very reliable; the only problem is forwarding local printers to the server but I can work around that. Over the years I have found TightVNC as server and client unfailingly reliable and my instinct is to go with that: TightVNC server on the Sunfire and TightVNC clients on the Windows PCs.

With TightVNC server the server itself would not even need to run X; TightVNC will open virtual X sessions on the server. That's why I was wondering if there's any load on the server video adapter at all. I assume the load is on the client PC but I could be very wide of the mark here.