Two sites, separated by a slowish link...

[duncane]

Okay, we're (soon to be) two sites, one of which will be closing in a couple of years time.

There's currently a 10Mb/s internet connection, soon to be updated to 100Mb/s link, to the town hall, then back to the other school (a round trip of between 0.5-1 miles).

The site that's remaining open will host the SIMS server, VLE and OWA email server. It's envisaged that each site will keep its own fileserver, and any shared resources would be on the VLE. There's already a hosted SLG service, which it's envisaged will be used for most staff instead of SIMS. (A few power users will access the full SIMS via a terminal server on the remote site.)

Now, we'd like staff to be able to authenticate from the closing site on the VLE and OWA servers. I've vague notions of inter-forests trusts (in that I've heard of them) - basically I think there's a desire to have the minimum of changes on either side.

By trying to keep the sites separated, are we really just making things harder for ourselves? Would a 100MB/s link be fast enough to handle normal day-to-day internet traffic, SIMS and downloading resources from the far site? (I suspect not.)

I'm just trying to get it clear in my mind, and I'm open to suggestions.

Cheers.

[FN-GM]

By trying to keep the sites separated, are we really just making things harder for ourselves? Would a 100MB/s link be fast enough to handle normal day-to-day internet traffic, SIMS and downloading resources from the far site? (I suspect not.)

We are a split site school with 1200 ish computers all on one domain. We also have a 100mbs link and find we dont have any major issues. The link is a direct link and isnt a VPN down the internet etc.

On each site we the following servers:

Domain Controllers
File Servers (for staff and student based on that site)
Ghost Server
Print Server
Proxy Server
Antivirus & WSUS

All the other stuff (sims, terminal servers, biometrics, eclipse etc) is based in one building.

It works well and we dont have major problems. Sims works for the clients that dont have a server on site.
The problem we do have is if lots of people are opening large media files stored on a server on the other site.

[FN-GM]

Also setting up Active Directory of sites and serivces properly should reduce the stress on the connection caused by replication.

[joe90bass]

We used to be two sites - upper and lower school. The link went via the local library and was 10 MB/s. DC, SIMS server, email and file server with for upper school pupils and all staff on upper school site, also had whole school shared drive on as well. There was a DC and file server (one box) for lower school users on lower school site. Never really had any issues, though file access was a little slower for staff on lower school site but nothing to cause any real headache!

Originally two separate domains I moved all lower school PCs to be part of Upper School domain within a year of starting as NM!

[p858snake]

By trying to keep the sites separated, are we really just making things harder for ourselves?

Will there be people travelling between sites? It's probably easier just to flatten it into a single domain.

Basically think of it one site with multiple domains like in the old admin/student scenarios with some little changes.