Another important difference between the host-based and Terminal Services environments is how applications that run in these environments must be designed. In a centralized host environment, applications must be developed specifically to run in that environment. With Terminal Services, applications designed for any Windows-based environment should work without having to be explicitly developed for the Terminal Services environment. Applications that run on Windows 2000 Server and Windows NT Server 4.0 should run without modification when Terminal Services is enabled.
This is important when you consider the implications of multiple users sharing a Windows 2000-based system simultaneously. Instead of different users running applications using their own computer hardware resources (such as CPU, memory, and disk) and local software resources (such as registry settings, preference files, and dynamic link libraries), Terminal Services users share hardware and software resources. For example, if two users run the same application in a Terminal Services environment, two copies of that application are started in the same system, each operating under a different user context. All of this is managed transparently by Terminal Services within the operating system.
Multiple users accessing the same set of applications in a common system can create contention:
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