Advice on some upgrades please . . .

[jamin100]

Ok, both our Admin and Curriculum servers are slowing down and generally starting to cause us some problems. Nothing that generally cant be fixed but the head is insistant on new servers (Dont think she's even seen the servers) I've told her that they dont really need replacing but she want it done anyway.

 

We are a 2 form entry Primary school, 500 children, 50 staff, 150 Windows XP machines.

At the moment we have 2x Dual Core Xeons with 2GB RAM servers.

 

Server 1 (curriculum) hosts AD, User Areas, Profiles, Printers, Shares

Server 2 (Admin) has DNS, DHCP, CMIS, Sophos EM

 

We also have 2 other servers that do various other roles such as WSUS, Policy Central, Ghost

 

All our servers currently run Server 2k3, All desktop/Laptops run XP.

Our switches were recently replaced with Cisco kit and we have Ruckus wireless so we don't need to worry about that.

 

Looking towards the future, i can see at some point i'm going to have to upgrade the clients to Wndows 7. The head wants this server(s) to last a good 4 years. So I need a plan on what to replace and what to replace it with.

 

LINK2ICT dont support CMIS on Server 2k8 so that leaves me with 2k3.

 

I havnt looked into this with much detail at the moment but here's what i'm thinking at the moment.

 

Replace admin server with a better spec'd machine. Something beefy with 8 GB RAM. I'm thinking 8GB because I may think about virtualisation as well but this will depend on cost.

 

Replace the Curriculum machine with a nice server with at least 4GB RAM and Server 2k8.

I would then use the old curriculum server to host all the shares and user profiles.

 

Regarding licensing, I know that i would need cals for 2k8 and 2k3, BUT would i need cals for each 2k3 server. Example: 2 x 2k3 servers 50 clients, how many cals would i need 50 or 100?

[waldronm2000]

Depends on whether you license per seat or per server. Default is per server, and with only one server on each network that's probably what you're using. With this model you would need 50 CALs on each server, so 100 total. However, you can do a one time only, non-reversible change to per seat (I think they've changed the name to something like "per client or per user", but basically it still means per seat), in which case the same CALs can be used to access both servers, so you would only need 50.

 

At least, that's my understanding...

Edited January 7, 2010 by waldronm2000
Corrected typo