Advise - Replacement Curriculum Server

Hi,

As the old curriculum server has died I will be joining the admin and curric domains so the admin server can provide some much needed redundancy.

I am looking for some advise on a specification for a curriculum domain controller for a junior school. The number of machines connected will be around 20 desktops (ICT Suite), 30 laptops and around 30 teacher laptops. I was thinking initially 8GB of Ram and mirroring 2x500gb drives as the data requirements are small.

I am tempted with a HP server but a Dell server would come with 3 years on-site warranty.

Thanks in advance

By Junior I assume you mean Primary?

In previous threads of a similar nature I've been suggesting a HP ML110 G7 server, Quad Core CPU, 8GB RAM (min) and 2x1TB drives and the same would seem to apply here as well.
You don't need anything too fancy in the hardware as it won't be hammered much.

Its also easy enough to upgrade any HP to a 3 year warranty - just include it in your list of required specs when you put it out to tender.

If you are looking at some serious redundancy look into Microsoft DFS-R in Server 2008 R2, it allows for storage mirroring so if one server does go down the other picks up all of the storage requests (you do need Enterprise lics for this though).

I'm pretty sure that Capita schools arm are offering a 'free' technical no obligation inspection currently.

To quote from a recent e-mail:

Our technician will be on site for up to three hours where they will review your current IT setup. After the visit you will receive recommendations to help you make decisions when planning future budgets and IT developments. Take advantage of this limited offer, call now to book on 0844 893 6000

^^Need, are you sure? I have DFS-R running between 2003R2 Server Standard and 2008R2 Server Standard, with the 2003 ready to be migrated to the newer OS. May be my licenses don't cover this (ooops) but never saw any docs saying that.

Server 2008 R2 Editions guide says DFS-R isn't included - Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Editions (bottom of the page in a PDF) so whats going on there I don't know!

You do still get some separate Infants and Juniors schools.

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8GB RAM should be fine, 500GB may be but it depends on the school (and new staff with different storage consumption habits can mess up trends).. what kind of disk usage do you have now? Note I reckon you should allow a minimum 40GB for 2K8 R2 OS inc. page file, few bits of junk you haven't tidied up etc.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jamesfed

Server 2008 R2 Editions guide says DFS-R isn't included - Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Editions (bottom of the page in a PDF) so whats going on there I don't know!

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Ah I see - yeah it's limited to one DFS root. That's what we have though; one namespace, that root is the entire file share and its sub-shares. Not 100% that this is the best way to do it, but it works extremely well IME with 1.2TB of data.

Back on topic! Does the server hold any other roles? If it's just AD, maybe DNS etc you won't need to spend big money. It may be handy to set aside some extra power - but if you want to keep this as a bare-metal DC then that won't be a huge amount. Plenty of RAM as ever, fast disks preferable but 2008R2 is pretty kind on hardware in this role IME.

Thank you for all the replies and suggestions.

The old disks were 250gb with 160gb used so I think 500gb will be fine.

I will have a look at the HP ML110.

Cheers