[German]Brief information for administrators who are responsible for Windows servers and have Microsoft teams (Citrix, RDS, VDI) in use. Keep an eye on virtual memory, teams are a memory hog.
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If you read up on the requirements of Microsoft teams, for example on this Microsoft page, the requirements are quite moderate. And in this Microsoft document, the memory requirements for teams in VDI (Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure) or Citrix environments are not exceptional. Microsoft writes, that 500 to 1024 megabytes of RAM per user should be calculated.
But: Microsoft Teams uses the Electron Framework. I had already pointed out here in the blog (see Microsoft Teams and it's security), that the Eelectron framework is good for nasty surprises. Sometimes they ship outdated Chrome browsers with known vulnerabilities. But that's a different story.
By chance I came across this blog post during my research for this article. It deals with the installation of teams in (Citrix) environments. Maybe it's helpful for somebody.
Observation: Server runs out of memory
I just got caught up in this tweet from Manuel Winkel, thought it will be helpful to compile it into an article. Winkel is a Citrix Technology Advocate (CTA) and also takes care of team installations (with Citrix) on Windows servers for customers.
I've recently had to complain about the RAM usage aswell.
It seem a more recent Teams version is a bit savy. Only 500-800 MB per user.
Welcome to electron / web apps.@MicrosoftTeams— al Qamar (Karl Wester-Ebbinghaus) (@tweet_alqamar) May 4, 2020
A customer who runs Microsoft teams on Windows Server (with Citrix App virtualization) encountered a problem. The Windows Server instanced was making trouble. Manuel told me in an answer tweet, the Microsoft Teams runs in a Citrix environment and the server stopped it's general work. Only after a hard reboot the machine was able again to run normally.
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And there was another addition on Twitter: In this case it was a Windows Server 2019 with teams 1.3.00.4461 (64-bit) machine based install and Citrix vda 1912. the screenshot was with optimization. But Manuel had seen the same behavior without optimization.
An analysis showed that Microsoft teams used more than 8 gigabytes of memory per user. By then, 13 users were enough to bring the server down. It turned out that the virtual memory for Windows servers was set too small. After increasing the value for PageFile, the server ran stable again.
In this reply to Twitter Tweet, someone points out that technically it is not a 'virtual memory' limitation, but rather a matter of 'committed memory' – the amount of memory reserved for a process (RAM and PageFile). He has also linked the corresponding Microsoft document.
German blog reader Karl points out in his answer at Twitter (see above Twitter excerpt) that he has already noticed this. He points his finger at the Electron framework. Microsoft also deals with this topic in the article How Microsoft Teams uses memory. I don't know if this always happens – just take the message as a hint to keep an eye on the virtual memory setting on Windows Server when using teams (VDI, Citrix, RDS).
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