Windows Azure - For Schools - way to go or not?

[speckytecky]

My son's a SharePoint architect working on contracts from home. He was recently telling me that he has switched to Windows Azure to run his work out from. He has 2 virtual DC's set up on it and a heap of other stuff (My SQL etc.) and it does the job very well for his needs.

 

At work we are a small KS3 Special School for boys who have various difficulties. we have a heap of kit but haven't ventured down the road of virtualisation yet - I can't get my head round Migrating our E-mail system so going virtual in any way is way ahead of me!! That said it got me to thinking we have a now getting toward old DC running Windows 2008 Standard server and a second newer DC that's running the R2 version and hosting the MIS so I need to be planning toward the future and wonder if I ought to be exploring something like Azure as an option?

[dhicks]

My son's a SharePoint architect working on contracts from home. He was recently telling me that he has switched to Windows Azure to run his work out from. He has 2 virtual DC's set up on it and a heap of other stuff (My SQL etc.) and it does the job very well for his needs.

 

Your son might be the best person to explain the strengths and weaknesses of Azure, then, although if he works exclusivly with Microsoft's development stack he's going to think a certain way and approach problems in a certain fashion. I wouldn't have thought a remote DC would quite be capable of replacing a local DC yet, although as an offsite backup of Active Directory it might be very useful. The same would hold for file servers and similar - you'll want the performance of a locally available machine for I/O and network performance, although some kind of remote "cloud backed" backup storage would be handy. What would be best would be if you could set up and configure all your VMs and services in the cloud (DC, file servers, things like MIS servers and so on), then plonk some big bits of hardware locally, install some kind of cloud bootloader and have all your VMs and so forth get magically cached locally, with no further effort on your part - have your own local slice of a cloud that then gets replicated up to the main cloud. If that is what Microsoft are offering then it might be worth looking at, if not I'd maybe wait until they are.