If anyone is interested we are hosting 270 school SIMS and FMS databases centrally on a farm of terminal servers. This removes the need for dedicated admin servers for our schools, no upgrades, no SIMS backups etc etc. If anyone would like to get more info or if you are implementing something similar and want to share your experiences just shout.
Steve Edgar
I'm very interested in this, as we are potentially looking at supporting a number of our primary schools this way.
Obviously it won't be on the same scale but I'd be interested to learn from your experiences.
quite a few LAs are runninmg smaller scale implementations especially for their smaller schools. We actually run a number of large secondary as well as most of our primaries.
What sort of scale are you talking about ? nos of schools etc
I thought FMS was not very TS friendly. How does that work?
Dead right. We have dedicated FMS servers that can handle up to 20 databases each. We are using a comination of hardware and virtual servers to handle this. No load balancing for FMS as each school goes to a specific server.
Not much in terms of problems with it now. have used a 3rd party package called Screwdrivers to eliminate 99% of printing problems
Vmware? I assume that needs a lot of memory for all those Database servers! How have you arranged the SQL licensing?
yes Vmware and it has worked a treat but yes they are beefy boxes. All the data is held on our SAN and all the blade servers boot direct from the SAN so we can rebuild/.clone one in a few minutes. I will ask about the licensing as someone else dealt with that side of things .....
ESX, blades and an EMC SAN here
Its a bit expensive though! I decided against SAN booting as I wanted to keep the swap partitions on the servers local drives, and once you build a set of instructions, ESX can be installed in an hour or so anyway. Do you backup with an agent in the VM or the disk images?
It isn't cheap but it is very reliable. We have been running a year now and it is even popular with some of the secondary schools.
Will check the backups as other people look after all that here within the infrastructure team
We are currently talking to Capita and others regarding a county wide implementation of Learning Gateway (or alternative product). Currently no one seems to have a product that will work with multiple databases in a single location (AD problems with current models of s/w)
You have a team!
I'm SAN/Network/ESX/Backup/SIMS etc all in one.
It's been great fun though, and Vmotion is always fun to show to people.
I am part of the ICT dept at Oxfordshire and not Education/CYPF. I manage the SIMS support team and we make use of the expertise around us as much as poss !!!! I am already braindead
I'm testing ESX3 (its just about to install) at this very moment, preparing to convert from 2.5 during half term. I'm very happy with it, just 3 physical servers left to move over, one of which is sims.
In total we run 33 servers - inc virtual on our SIMS/FMS farm
We are just a school (1000 pupils). I like enterprise equipment though. We needed more servers, and had several to replace. The physical servers sat around not doing much, but I wanted much more limited roles for each server so we tried ESX, I'd been using workstation at home for a while.
We have a bladecenter with 6 blades, an EMC CX300 SAN, with an lto2 library for backup. Currently running 15 Virtual servers, this might seem a lot, but I can take most things offline and only affect a small part of the network.
Its taken a long time to get going as I'm self taught, and my workload increased in all the wrong places - its more the time needed to finish the virtualisation project than the skills.
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