Cloud Hosting Servers - Anyone started or looked into Migrating?

[Prevention]

As we discover more and more services are becoming cloud the need for heavy onsite setups is slowly dwindling.

I'm essentially running Sims and a few lower profile pieces of software and a File Server.

I'm looking at cost savings and migrating 8 sites into a central domain using Cloud Hosted Servers.

I think I'll still have RODC's on site and potentially file servers but the rest can probably shift to cloud.

 

Has anyone done this or know any Pro/Cons?

 

Tl;dr - Do I need a Virtual Host at every site anymore?

Can we get away with Small RODC's and a good internet line?

 

Thanks!

[Michael]

File services can be migrated to the likes of Google Drive or SharePoint, so this greatly reduces the need for spacious servers, SANs or NASes, but removing servers completely still (in my view) isn't realistic, but you can implement a simple virtualised server for the remaining roles, which is then very attractive from a cost perspective.

[Jcx500]

I'd Say it depends on what you need/want on site and would it be more cost effective. Run servers on site or in the cloud? Which you can do for a fair price now also you will need a reliable/redundant connection to these services

[Michael]

You don't necessarily need a server on each site anymore, as a L3 switch will do DHCP/DNS to another site, but then what happens if that link goes down? Users in theory wouldn't be able to authenticate.

 

There are also other challenges, such as legacy applications (like SIMS), and even services such as WSUS. It's nice to have a local cache at each site.

 

I think it very much depends how fast the links to each site are - lease lines are definitely preferable!

[sted]

You don't necessarily need a server on each site anymore, as a L3 switch will do DHCP/DNS to another site, but then what happens if that link goes down? Users in theory wouldn't be able to authenticate.

 

There are also other challenges, such as legacy applications (like SIMS), and even services such as WSUS. It's nice to have a local cache at each site.

 

I think it very much depends how fast the links to each site are - lease lines are definitely preferable!

 

if youre running win10 wsus isnt as much of an issue as it can grab updates from other pcs on the network so that at least helps with the bandwidth issues (granted you get every update ms pushes) but its one less problem to solve you could probably even have a crummy old pc sat there to literally be an update cache just chuck it in a cupboard and dont turn off

[supportman]

I still don't think I have seen a good implementation of OneDrive yet for students. I'd love to see someone who has done it successfully.

 

It still seems silly running a huge internal file server when we get some much free storage online with each Office 365 account. But mapping folders has never been reliable for us, even with 3rd party products.

[gshaw]

I still don't think I have seen a good implementation of OneDrive yet for students. I'd love to see someone who has done it successfully.

 

It still seems silly running a huge internal file server when we get some much free storage online with each Office 365 account. But mapping folders has never been reliable for us, even with 3rd party products.

 

Files on Demand works a treat for us; if you go 1809 build of Windows 10 it also cleans up stale cached files so the local drives don't fill up

[Michael]

I still don't think I have seen a good implementation of OneDrive yet for students. I'd love to see someone who has done it successfully.

 

It still seems silly running a huge internal file server when we get some much free storage online with each Office 365 account. But mapping folders has never been reliable for us, even with 3rd party products.

 

This is why in a lot of migrations we've kept O365 for mail and introduced Google Drive/File Stream. It's a much better implementation than OneDrive and by default maps as G:\

[robyholmes]

Files on Demand works a treat for us; if you go 1809 build of Windows 10 it also cleans up stale cached files so the local drives don't fill up

 

We're on 1803 but using the same Files on Demand option and its working very well for students and staff. Even with small SDD's on workstations (Default is 120GB but we have a few with 60GB and they seem to work fine)