Rebuild network from scratch

[Stevecee]

Hi

 

We are a special school that has just moved into a new building from 2 separate sites, each site had its own DC and we had one exchange box hosted on one of the site. Shared areas and users who worked across both sites had their work replicated but this broke down some time before the move onto one site

 

Having moved onto one site we are still seeing lots of issues where users are not actually seeing the correct home directory etc. The server were originally setup by county but later the management of this was taken over by myself, the documentation of the setup is minimal / sketchy at least, so I find it pretty impossible to see what is happening.

 

The servers are 5 years old next Summer and I'm thinking the time is right to replace them and start again from scratch.

 

I would likely move to office 365 for mail , but the questions I have are:

 

Should we go virtual or stay as we are with dedicated servers?

how would I go about moving people's work, i think I would want to recreate the users but transfer the files?

 

At the minute we have 2x 2012r2 servers which act as file servers, one is DC we have one 2008r2 server which hosts exchange 2010

 

We use a lot of video / photographic evidence being a special school so wee do use a lot of storage

 

any suggestions / tips?

 

thanks

 

Steve

[free780]

What speed is your wan link?

[Stevecee]

What speed is your wan link?

 

We share a 100mb broadband link with the secondary and primary schools on our campus, but we are on one site now! the network has GB backbone and fibre between buildings.

 

Steve

[win]

Virtualise all your servers, put 2012r2 on all hosts.

 

Replication isn't 100% reliable so you may want to leave that bit out - depending on the backbone and distance between sites

[Stevecee]

Virtualise all your servers, put 2012r2 on all hosts.

 

Replication isn't 100% reliable so you may want to leave that bit out - depending on the backbone and distance between sites

 

Hi

 

sorry if i didn't make it clear, we have all moved onto one site so there is no need for replication any more, many of the issues I am facing is because there still are some remnants of the DFS somewhere (don't know where exactly), hence the decision to start again

 

Steve

[PotNoodleTech]

Definitely sounds like a candidate for starting from scratch. If you are able to keep the usernames the same for the new network this will make file transfer much easier!

 

Definitely virtualise.

[hallb15]

I agree - now that you are on one site and you are managing the network, you should start again. Office365 is great for email, but I wouldn't attempt to use Onedrive for storing users documents.

Do you have the budget for a new server? If so you can set that up on a new domain to host hyper-v and virtualise everything. Once you've got it all ticking over nicely, then you can create new accounts for all your users on the new domain and copy their home areas over.

Its daunting at first, but when everything is working how you want it, and you have a better understanding of your network, it makes supporting it so much easier!

[Stevecee]

Do you have the budget for a new server?

 

Hi

 

The main reason for looking at his now is a) to look and see what the best way forward is, and b) plan the budget to make it happen. so far I have had what I have asked for (but then again I haven't been unreasonable in my requests!

 

Steve