Site-to-Site Help

[karldenton]

Hi

 

After a bit of advice on this as my head is a shed with it.

 

We have become a MAT and Headteacher wants all schools connected. One primary will be the main site with all the servers / data.

 

The main site currently has a Virgin 152Mb connection that has around 8mb upload. Which is around £80 a month

 

 

My current options at the moment are:

 

1 - Sophos UTM at the main site with other schools utilising a RED15. Route all off-site internet traffic straight to the internet and inter-site stuff to the main site.

 

2 - An MPLS leased line solution at the main site and other schools in the MAT. They are then connected at ISP level rather than relying on the main site. The down side to this is the circa £4500 a year cost per site.

 

Thoughts / suggestions please.

[dblight]

Just make sure you have full control of firewalls for each site. I had a nightmare with SWGFL getting them to open up the schools to talk to each other!

[mavhc]

If you've got got 100Mbps upload at your main site don't try to store all the data there.

 

I've set up a 4 site school, shared AD, DFS replication of drives only I can write to. Centralised SIMS, local files, if a user visits another site their files are still available, just a warning it might be slower.

 

Use DFS for all shares, replication be careful with. Backup to central site at night with one way replication if you wish. I tend to have 2 DFS roots, one for home drives, and non public shares, like software distribution, and one for shared folders.

 

My AD is set up like AD\Computers\Sitename\Laptops, AD\Users\Sitename\Staff, and DFS like \\domain.local\SchoolInitials\Sitename\PupilShared, \\domain.local\SchoolInitials\Resources (replicated) and \\domain.local\share\SoftwareInstall (replicated) and \\domain.local\share\sitename\pupils\09jsmith

 

Don't forget about Site GPOs, they're a bit hidden, use those for WSUS etc.

 

People will try to print to printers on other sites, usually by accident.

 

Use this one time offer to set everything up properly, same username format, same shared drives. Put all their old shared files into a To Be Deleted Jan 2017 folder, and then train people how to move the stuff they want. In staff and pupil shares set up 10-20 root folders, and set permissions so no one can add any more. Force them to organise.

 

https://code.google.com/archive/p/sims2ad/ is my script to sync SIMS and Excel with AD, move user files if people move sites, etc. Talk to the SIMS people about how they'll store what site someone's on.

[twin--turbo]

How far appart are they geographically.

 

Personally, to do it right you would want SHDS links between sites, if possible do it in a circular rather than star topology and go for 1Gb.

 

I would not use the GFL

[Steve21]

The main site currently has a Virgin 152Mb connection that has around 8mb upload. Which is around £80 a month

 

I assume from those figures that's a normal home connection style rather than business? If so certainly wouldn't suggest it for trying to run any MATs etc if you're expecting to run all services across it effectively at 8Mb to dozens/hundreds of users

 

How many other users are there remotely? Even 100Mb leased etc could struggle if you're expecting centralised access to everything

 

Steve

[karldenton]

How far appart are they geographically.

 

We have a main outreach office that is about 8 miles away. We don't have any schools as yet but could be anything up to 40 miles away !

[karldenton]

I assume from those figures that's a normal home connection style rather than business? If so certainly wouldn't suggest it for trying to run any MATs etc if you're expecting to run all services across it effectively at 8Mb to dozens/hundreds of users

 

How many other users are there remotely? Even 100Mb leased etc could struggle if you're expecting centralised access to everything

 

Steve

 

Yes its Virgin media business but a hme-style connection.

 

At present we have approx 16 off-site workers that connect in via DirectAccess

[FN-GM]

2 - An MPLS leased line solution at the main site and other schools in the MAT. They are then connected at ISP level rather than relying on the main site. The down side to this is the circa £4500 a year cost per site.

 

Thoughts / suggestions please.

 

At the moment its about £2k for a BT point to point 100mb line.

[SchoolsBroadband]

hi @karldenton,

 

we already do this for many schools. Even though a leased line costs more than a standard Virgin business connection you really do get what you pay for. You may also want to consider EoFTTC if you've any smaller primary schools and you're looking to share data over the WAN as this gives dedicated speeds as leased lines do up to a point.

 

Quite happy to give advice or a quote as you're not based too far away from us.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

 

Hi

 

After a bit of advice on this as my head is a shed with it.

 

We have become a MAT and Headteacher wants all schools connected. One primary will be the main site with all the servers / data.

 

The main site currently has a Virgin 152Mb connection that has around 8mb upload. Which is around £80 a month

 

 

My current options at the moment are:

 

1 - Sophos UTM at the main site with other schools utilising a RED15. Route all off-site internet traffic straight to the internet and inter-site stuff to the main site.

 

2 - An MPLS leased line solution at the main site and other schools in the MAT. They are then connected at ISP level rather than relying on the main site. The down side to this is the circa £4500 a year cost per site.

 

Thoughts / suggestions please.

[Geoff]

Another option (which is what we do) is centralise you infrastructure and have everyone at the remote sites come in over Terminal services (we actually have Citrix). The bandwidth requirement for a 'typical' remote desktop session is pretty frugal (we get away with 10mbit at some sites of 20 - 30 staff). This will run into problems if you want to use heavy multimedia based applications though (we've found Lync can give us headaches).

[SchoolsBroadband]

Absolutely. Put some infrastructure in your ISP's data centre or use their virtual server / IaaS platform to put everything on. This puts less strain on your leased line if you hosted everything at one site for the WAN to connect back to.

 

Dave