How many servers in your school?

[rayfleming]

I've been in a range of secondary schools recently, and am still always surprised at how many servers there are in some - the average I've seen seems to be between 10 and 15, although I have been to one where it was 30, before they virtualised.

 

Becta's latest Harnessing Technology survey focused on desktops and notebooks, but didn't cover the server side, so nothing like a non-scientific survey:

 

How many servers do you have?

How many students?

What type of school are you in - secondary/primary/other?

 

Once there's enough responses, I'll aggregate the answers and put it back in this thread.

[sparkeh]

I work at three primary schools. If we are talking about DCs (as things like mail/web/filtering servers are hosted by LA) then:

 

School 1: ~300 NOR = 1 DC

School 2: ~350 NOR = 1 DC

School 3: 600+ NOR = 2 DC

[webman]

Secondary 11-16, ~720 students.

 

We have about 22 physical boxes acting as servers at the moment.

Most are on the current network, but some are running the new CC4 network we are soon switching to. About About 5 of the current physical boxes will be virtualised to join 4 other already-vritual servers.

[featured_spectre]

Middle (Y5-Y8) ~300, 2 Servers, 1 NAS, 1 SAN.

[3s-gtech]

13 servers, one of them a VM host. Perform a variety of jobs, could virtualise further but I'm pretty happy with the setup at the moment - in this number are a hardware main domain controller, a DC with backup role, a huge file server, a Mac server and a large capacity FOG server - all things our virtual host will not take.

[dhicks]

How many servers do you have?

 

Physical or virtual? We have 10 physical machines running around 16 virtual machines, plus a separate physical backup server and a couple of machines running Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services. I plan to trim the number of physical machines down over the summer, if funds are available - some of our servers are desktops pressed in to service, we could do with consolidating to fewer but larger machines.

 

How many students?

 

800.

 

What type of school are you in - secondary/primary/other?

 

Private nursery / prep / secondary / sixth form - 3 months to 18 years.

 

--

David Hicks

[sted]

work in primary school snad almost all have 1 (unless you count print server vms when manufacturers dont do 2008r2 drivers)

[Guest Guest]

2 DC

2 TS

2 Fileservers

1 App

1 Admin/SIMS

1 VLE

1 Intranet

1 ISA

1 Backup

1 Openaccess wLan router

1 Proxy

1 Print

 

Possibly in the future;

1 NAC

More TS

TS gateway

 

Id say its extreamly easy to get 10-15 nowadays without virtualisation.

[cookie_monster]

Secondary school 1500 pupils with about 500 desktops. We have about 8 physical servers but 2 run VM's, overall we have about 16 (VMs and physical) servers including the Citrix boxes and the Smoothwall. We'll look to move more to VM's going forwards.

[AngryITGuy]

Secondary school with about 750 students on roll

 

We have about 15 physical boxes acting as servers at the moment and three NAS boxes.

[AngryTechnician]

Prep school (3-13), 510 pupils. At present, 4 physical boxes, as follows:

 

1x RM CC3 DC (Forest Root)

1x RM CC3 DC (Alternate)

2x Hyper-V hosts, one with 4 guests, the other with 3 guests.

 

That makes 9 servers that are actually used for something, +2 if you count the Hyper-V hosts which do nothing except provide the hypervisor role.

[Mr.Ben]

I'm an other: A Special School

 

Here we have 120 Clients, 250 Users, 3 Physical Servers and 4 Virtual Servers (1 of the Physical Servers is a Host (Hyper-V))

 

During the Summer I am going to replace two servers with another host server and 4 more virtual servers, whilst moving to windows 2008R2 and Windows 7. One of the older physical servers will be used for DPM, one will be retired.

 

You may be surprised at the amount of servers I have, but this is down to the amount of services and roles that are run from them, and also the way that schools work. If you had any suggestions on how I could consolidate even further I would be happy to discuss them.

[MatthewL]

We have around 112 severs, alot are virtual now, slowly migrating the rest over, this is over 2 trusts, we have 2 SAN's, basically 2 of everything. More servers seem to pop up weekly and these are spread around 120 sites!!

[MatthewL]

Oh and to add we have some 4000 users working 24/7 in some cases.

[RabbieBurns]

We are K-12 (5yo -18 yo) with 2000 students and about 300 staff.. Currently on about 25 Servers (including PBX etc) But in the process of a 12 month P2V plan which will see us go to 4 Physical hosts with a SAN (keeping probably the MIS server and PBX on their own hardware)

[cookie_monster]

Oh and to add we have some 4000 users working 24/7 in some cases.

 

 

Are you in education Matthew can you tell us a small amount about your organisation?

 

Thanks.

[MatthewL]

No not in Education, work in Primary Care. Here is a low down of a Primary Care Trust, although we look after Adult Social Care.

[jsnetman]

1000 pupils 400 pc's

 

2 DC's

1 Exchange server

1 ISA server

1 Print server (Old demoted DC)

 

Looking to virtualise the print server and ISA over the summer and maybe the exchange server.

[jamin100]

Primary School

Nursery - Year 6

 

150 Clients, 500 Users, 5 servers

[sidewinder]

1700 students, 150-200 staff, 900 computers

 

12 servers

 

2x Domain Controllers

2x File servers

2x Mac servers

1x App server

1x VM Host (currently with 4 virtualised servers)

1x SIMS Server

1x Proxy Server

1x Backup server

1x Wireless management server

[zag]

900 students, 125 staff

 

14 servers

 

3 x DC's

1 x file server

1 x exchange

1 x library

1 x sims

1 x backup/print

1 x profile server

1 x boarding terminal server

1 x video/media

2 x sharepoint

1 x anti virus

 

Virtualizing a lot recently though, will take a few years to condense it down to about 4 physical servers in a rack.

Edited June 18, 2010 by zag

[browolf]

1650 pupils

secondary school

 

3 file-servers

1 exchange

1 blackberry/wsus

2 terminal servers

1 sql server for sims

2 admin file servers

1 telephone system server

1 isa server

4 debian squid server

1 ubuntu fog server

2 old servers doing nothing much

1 test server

[alunmjones]

Seconday School + Sixth Form

850 pupils

90 staff

 

Curriculum

480 PC'S/Laptops

1 DC/File Server

1 ISA/Filtering Server

1 E-mail/Web/Radius Server

1 Print Server

1 NAS Box

1 Linux Applience

 

1 Server that crashed(It annyoed me, and gave me a lot of extra work and a headake), under my desk

 

Sims

1 Server

11 PC's

 

Were thinking about virtualizing at some point, tho i doubt our physical servers will reduce much if at all.

Edited June 18, 2010 by alunmjones

[Ric_]

Secondary and sixth form with ~1100 pupils and 100 staff

350+ access devices (desktops, laptops, terminals, etc.)

17 physical servers (2 of which are virtualisation hosts running 18 VMs)

[pete]

1,000 users, 450 > 500 client devices. Secondary.

 

9 physical machines in production (including 3 virtual hosts).

14 virtual machines in production.