talksr Posted March 23, 2015 Posted March 23, 2015 I attended a useful RM seminar last week where they recommended giving Azure from Microsoft a try. It seems you can get it for free if you are a school. I have googled it and got a number of links, but they all seem to be for universities or students studying Computer Science. Has anyone successfully signed up for it and if so how? I can't really enter in professor name and university name when I am working at a school! Don't think they would accept it.
beancole Posted March 23, 2015 Posted March 23, 2015 I remember looking into this a while ago. Problem is there seems to be no useful info and so much contradiction. Its like office 365 free for schools, but it only works for primary schools as its a cut down version. On the Azure front I think its a non starter. 1
GrumbleDook Posted March 23, 2015 Posted March 23, 2015 If you speak to the MS Edu Team they can get things sorted for you on a trial. If you have O365 for Education (E1 plan) then you have Azure AD already. When I first looked at it in schools (many moons ago) it was on the basis of needing to test rollouts of software and Azure could give a simple solution to testing without needing the hardware for it, or to use of as part of BCDR.
themightymrp Posted March 23, 2015 Posted March 23, 2015 What exactly does the Azure AD give you with Office 365? I've never quite figured out what it is and what the management part gets me to (and it seems to rarely load the admin screen for me for some unknown reason)
jonnykewell1 Posted March 23, 2015 Posted March 23, 2015 For anyone looking at Azure. Troy Hunt made this video which gives you an incite into the sort of things you can do with it. The World's Greatest Azure Demo 2
apearce Posted March 23, 2015 Posted March 23, 2015 What exactly does the Azure AD give you with Office 365? I've never quite figured out what it is and what the management part gets me to (and it seems to rarely load the admin screen for me for some unknown reason) Azure AD is Office 365 - well elements of it. Azure AD is the authentication side of Office 365. When you create your users and groups, configure ADFS/Federation and adding domains, you are adding them to Azure AD. It means that you can still use Azure AD if you are not going to Office 365 for other application and soon we'll hear more about how Cloud Domain joins which is a Azure AD features. Oh and as its part of Office 365, its free but there are some additional paid for features such as Self Service Password reset. I'm sure James will jump in on this and add more.
apearce Posted March 23, 2015 Posted March 23, 2015 The other thing about Azure is that it so much more than just Azure AD. VMs in the cloud, Site to Site VPN, websites and video streaming for you custom app. Office 365 already uses a lot of these such as the new feature coming to Office 365 called Office 365 Video suchs the Azure Media Streaming Services such by NBC and NFL for games and the Olympics and as we look to bring out apps, we are using their websites but more importantly we use it for VMs so they are always available and we dont have to purchase servers and its HA. SIMs can now be purchased and migrated to Azure VMs 2
themightymrp Posted March 23, 2015 Posted March 23, 2015 I assume the VM's in the cloud are a paid for add on? We don't get any of that through the O365 subscription? 1
Edu-IT Posted March 23, 2015 Posted March 23, 2015 I've not heard of it being free for schools before.
garethEds Posted March 23, 2015 Posted March 23, 2015 I don't think it is totally free. I believe your students get a certain allowance free every month. I tried to sign up for the Uni version but despite sending the online form, never heard a squeak. We have AzureAD setup and AD Sync working well now. GJE
apearce Posted March 24, 2015 Posted March 24, 2015 I've not heard of it being free for schools before. Some services are free - you get some website hostings for free (have to use *.azurewebsite.com) and you can pay for additional bandwidth and use your own domain name. Azure AD is free but there are premium features you have to pay for. VMs aren't free, different sizes are available for you to purchase. 1
jonnykewell1 Posted March 25, 2015 Posted March 25, 2015 Information about upgrading your account and how to add your own custom domain is all explained too in the video posted above if you need to know how to do it :-)
beancole Posted March 25, 2015 Posted March 25, 2015 The only way I see this being any good, as its certainly not free. Is if you use virtualisation with VM. VM is massively expensive and when windows next version of server comes out it might not work on it (had this at an old school 2012 wouldn't work, cost £25 grand to upgrade.)
GrumbleDook Posted March 26, 2015 Posted March 26, 2015 It might be an interesting exercise for a few folk to do ... Have a look at what the costs would be to purchase enough hardware and licences to be able to run a test network in the school for trying out updates of software, etc on the required number of VMs. Then do a comparison of costs if you do the same but via a hosted solution such as Azure* Based the time required with the VMs on the amount of time you spent patching, packaging, testing, etc. You can then also look at the amount of storage you need for these VMs too (you tend to still pay a storage cost, remember) or if not storing them, then you need to consider the bandwidth charges to download / upload the VMs. This is over an above looking at the use of hosted VM solutions for BCDR, etc. *Declaration of interest - I work for a vendor who provides cloud-hosted solutions via G Cloud 6 and this is an exercise we recommend as part of our scoping process.
Ephelyon Posted March 26, 2015 Posted March 26, 2015 There's also the issue of "responsiveness" when accessing cloud-based VMs, depending on your connection speed/reliability. Upload/download bandwidth should include e.g. "if I want to upgrade to SQL Server 2014 I may need to upload the ISO for it, or download it from Microsoft on the server VM which is incoming bandwidth either way".
dhicks Posted March 26, 2015 Posted March 26, 2015 (edited) Have a look at what the costs would be to purchase enough hardware and licences to be able to run a test network in the school for trying out updates of software, etc on the required number of VMs. Then do a comparison of costs if you do the same but via a hosted solution such as Azure* Just roughly: based on needing to run 6 virtual machines (DC, MIS, file server, print server, VLE, general stuff - no Exchange server), and assuming those VMs all fit under Azure's 100GB disk limit for their all-in-one backup service, plus 4TB of storage space for the file server, Azure would cost around £350 a month (we pay VAT, so I've included VAT in all costs). That's just a running backup of files, no versioning. Amazon's AWS costs around £85 per month for the storage gateway appliance that does the backup process, £95 per month for 1.5TB of VM disk image storage and £80 per month for 4TB of file storage - around £300 a month in total. Buying a new server with 8 1TB SSDs giving 6TB of storage in RAID 6 would cost around £3,000. Call that £100 per month over the next 3 years. Colocating that server in a data centre somewher with a 10GBps Internet connection is going to cost around £100 per month. That's around £200 a month in total. Do the above prices all sound about right? For diaster recovery - having most of our VMs mirrored to an offsite location where they can sit and be ready to run at a moment's notice - owning our own hardware and putting it in a datacentre somewhere is the cheapest option. Up until now we've been using DRBD to do disk replication between servers, although Hyper-V on top of a Windows storage pool seems to be a very easy-to-use option. Anyone any experience in using a storage pool over a VPN to a colocated server? -- David Hicks Edited March 26, 2015 by dhicks 2
GrumbleDook Posted March 26, 2015 Posted March 26, 2015 Thos prices look a very good start and that is a pretty good summary too. Next would be to calculate the difference in support costs (time to setup, maintain, routinely test, etc) to see if there are any noted differences between the 3 options.
Ephelyon Posted March 26, 2015 Posted March 26, 2015 @GrumbleDook, if I throw our solution (off-site to another school three miles away over PSN) into the mix here, is that going to muddy the water or could it be useful?
GrumbleDook Posted March 26, 2015 Posted March 26, 2015 That is another valuable and viable method ... it might be worth splitting the thread off though as it is getting a bit OT. What do others feel?
garethEds Posted March 26, 2015 Posted March 26, 2015 Wonder how much it would really cost MS to give it free to schools so they can teach pupils about networking etc etc. We could do it with older hardware I know but was just thinking. GJE
dhicks Posted March 27, 2015 Posted March 27, 2015 Next would be to calculate the difference in support costs (time to setup, maintain, routinely test, etc) to see if there are any noted differences between the 3 options. According to Microsoft's and Amazon's documentation, all three options are supposed to be really easy to use / maintain. The AWS option installs as a virtual appliance on your VMWare / Hyper-V host and takes care of shunting data between your local set of servers and AWS. Azure seems to work in a similar manner, although the replication feature might be a part of Server 2012 rather than a separate appliance. The replication between two sets of servers over a VPN connection of some kind is what I'm hoping to test out soon - I have some hardware available to try this out on, I'll see how easy it is to set up. if I throw our solution (off-site to another school three miles away over PSN) into the mix here, is that going to muddy the water or could it be useful? That's a potential options for us, too - in fact, we already have a server available we could use as the off-site mirror, so if we got another school to host a server for us it would make for a very cheap option. This rather depends on how we sort out a recipriocal agreement with another school, though - we'd need some sort of proper contract in place, we don't want our diaster recovery solution failing because someone at the other end changes their mind about having our server on site. Just to add that Google are now seemingly offering Server 2012 VMs on their systems - we have Server 2012-based domain controllers, so we couldn't have used their system before. I'll investigate how we might go about replicating local VMs to Google's infrastructure.
garethEds Posted March 27, 2015 Posted March 27, 2015 Our LEA have just bought into Azure in a big way and moved all of the school websites to the platform. It's great. I hear they are also moving their SharePoint over as well. Gareth
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