How many servers in your school?

[rayfleming]

After 25 replies, there's a discernible trend (although "lots of servers" isn't yet scientific enough)

[dhicks]

After 25 replies, there's a discernible trend (although "lots of servers" isn't yet scientific enough)

 

Well, yes, although it seems with good reason - most schools don't have the resources to buy larger servers (with their associated connectivity, space, racking, power and cooling needs) and are simply using whatever comes to hand. I get two or three phone calls every week where some random salesperson says "Have you considered virtualisation?", which gets rather tedious.

 

--

David Hicks

[User3204]

We have ~1500 students secondary school.

Pre virtualisation, we had 26 servers, but this included 5x CCTV units, duplicated tasks because we have 2 domains, so 4x DCs (2x each), 2x Proxys, 2x Fileservers, 2x print servers, 2x IAS/certificate servers.

 

Since virtualising we have physically: 3x servers in the cluster, 3 servers not virtualised, and still 5 CCTVs.

But the Guest servers, have multiplied, we now have aboout 40 within it, but we are in the process of moving to 2008, AND merging them into a standard/single domain.

[joe90bass]

Secondary school: 1100 pupils, 100ish staff

 

8 servers:

1 X 2008 DC/SQL

1x 2008 Exchange 2007/Web server plus 2 hyper V guests(1 2008R2 DC, and one Linux/koha) It would be nice to have a dedicated hyper-V host server, but that ain't going to happen!

3 X 2008R2 RDS servers

1 x 2003 WSUS/Successmaker/Exam software server

1 x 2003R2 NAS/storage server

1 x SIMS (on different domain)

1 x PC running a spare copy of 2003 server and OP Smart Monitor (rigged up to a spare 40" screen!)

 

400 PCs/laptops

125 Thin Clients

Edited June 18, 2010 by joe90bass
remembered OP smart monitor server

[Cache]

Secondary

 

Students: ~420

Staff: ~70

Computers: ~260

 

3 DCs (1 being decomissioned at present)

2 member servers

1 proxy server

[Soulfish]

11 - 16 secondary school with 1020 on roll. We currently have 4 physical servers with a SAN running around 30-35 virtual servers. Looking at adding another 3-4 physical servers to run a VDI and Virtual app (App-V/XenApp) deployment.

[john]

460 on roll 240 PCs in the estate, 14 physical servers, 1 Smoothy, 1 SAN and a few dodgy NAS boxes at present, moving to a new Citrix based setup with 2 Xen hosts running all 14 of those roles on VMs (and probably a few more!), 1 Smoothy, 3 SANs and no dogy NAS boxes.

[SYNACK]

School1: Integrated Primary (y1-8) 4 physical with 2VMs 650 children

School2: Primary (y1-6) 6 physical with 2VMs 550 children.

 

Would have less at school 2 is some MS services were not so difficult to move (Certificate Services)

[SimpleSi]

7 primarys (but I know of another 5 that are the same)

 

All have

1* w2k3 file server acting with file/dns/dhcp/print server roles.

1* county supplied cachepilot acting as local proxy/web cache and web server for espresso content.

 

1 of my schools has a NAS fileserver as well.

 

regards

 

Simon

[bio]

3100 students, 330 teachers, 900 workstations, 25 servers.

 

bio..

[Tyiell]

Secondary & 6Form here, 1200ish students, 200 staff, 700 workstations (+200 staff laptops ).

 

We currently have 18 servers, plus 2 virtuals. 3 of the physicals are Linux servers, the rest are MS Server 2003.

[russdev]

Middle School (Year 7 to 9)

400 Students

5 servers (3 curriculum, 1 admin, 1 cache serve)

[ianh64]

Independent School : Nursery and Primary age 2 - 11 years. Approx 120 pupils in primary school requiring either group or individual (<70 in years 4,5,6) access. Approx 30 PC's, expanding to approx 40 over summer. Only admin staff heavily utilise IT. This is expected to change with new Windows system and more widespread use of DoubleFirst.

 

1 Windows 2008R2 AD DC server hosting 2 hyper-V virtual machines - Dell T410 dual quad processor, 8GB RAM, Raid 5 - SAS 15k drives ~ 850GB storage

1 Navaho Server currently hosting staff and pupil requirements, will become legacy during Summer with new 20 seat domain ICT suite replacing 10 seat Navaho/workgroup.

 

Windows server hosting AD DC, Exchange Server, SQL Server/Double First, general infrastructure, routing and internet gateway/firewall.

 

Ideally we could do with a bit more memory - host +2VM a bit tight on 8GB. Admin staff, Windows AD infrastructure - phase 1 (final testing, imminent rollout), Staff/Student roll-out phase 2, Contingency/redundancy is phase 3 - budget is limited so will see if any old kit can be redeployed.

[Butuz]

Seconday here 1050 pupils 100 staff.

 

11 Physical Servers composed of:

 

2 x DC

2 x Vmware ESXi Hosts (running 8 VMs)

2 x Terminal Servers

2 x Misc Servers (due to be virtualised)

1 x Backup Exec Server

2 x SANs

 

Hopefully by Sept will be down to 8 Physicals.

 

Butuz

[ezzauk]

We are a FE College with around 600 Staff and 3500 FT Students out of the 12000 Students on our system.

 

Are setup is as follows:

 

Site A

8 x MIS Servers

1 x MIS Disk Backup Server

1 x MIS SAN

3 x DC's

2 x Home area servers

6 x Blades running 20 VM servers

2 x SANs

1 x Deployment/net apps

2 x Internal DNS

2 x External DNS

1 x Smoothwall UTM 1000

2 x Smoothwall NG08

1 x Web Server

1 x Reverse Porxy

1 x Moodle

1 x VoIP Server

1 x Door Access Server

1 x Disk Backup for non MIS

 

Site B

2 x DC

2 x Internal DNS

1 x Helpdesk Server

1 x File Archive Server

1 x Students Web Hosting Server

 

Site C

1 x DC / DNS

 

Site D

 

1 x DC / DNS

[CraigM]

South African High School, grades 8-12, equivalent of Form 2-6

 

About 1200 users, including staff. 1 DC, 1 Exchange, 1 CCTV, 1 Fog box, 1 FreeNAS to backup Exchange, 1 Backuppc for files, 1 firewall/cache/filtering, 1 anti-virus.

 

We are looking into getting a very powerful server next year, so that we can do away with the individual Exchange, FreeNAS, Fog and Backuppc boxes and virtualise the lot of them.

[maestromasada]

Secondary: 1200 students, 125 staff

1 FDC, 4DC, 1 TS and 4 member servers

No virtualisation at the moment, bugdet is an issue!

[aerospacemango]

FE College

 

Don't know the exact number of staff and students, but i'd guess 500/2500

 

30-ish servers + another couple on VM.

 

We host our own mail for students and staff, but are looking to farm that out over the summer.

 

Various Moodle, admin servers, etc etc

 

Looking to go down the virtual route over the next year or so....but then the budget kicked in, so that'll be stalled until we actually have a department budget again!!

[rayfleming]

Thanks for all of the answers.

 

I've churned them all into a spreadsheet (attached).

 

Here's the chart of what the answers look like.

 

The axes for the chart are no. of servers, and no. of students.

 

I have put them into two groups:

- Whether the school has already virtualised (green for virtualised, red for not)

- Primary (diamond) or secondary (triangle)

 

(I've made some subjective judgements when answers went across both categories)

 

If you draw an imaginary line from bottom left to top right, then 'below the line' is the better place to be - as that means lower servers/cost per student

http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-81-34/8420.HowManyServers.jpg

 

The things that immediately strike me are:

• Primary schools that have virtualised have more servers per student than those that don't - I think this is because they use more ICT - eg more desktops to support
  
• Secondary schools that have virtualised, have less servers per student - many of them have many, many more virtual servers, on a smaller number of physical servers
  
• Secondary schools who have virtualised their servers are supporting 40% more users per physical server. Up from an average of 84 students/server to 117 students/server.
  

How Many Servers Do Schools have.xlsx

[browolf]

it might be interesting to add how many technicians to that. we could go back and edit our posts?

[pete]

S' also worth remembering that a virtual server may exist because the (usually exam) software is horrible and has specific version dependencies that Does Not Play Nicely With Others. Bearing in mind how cheap a datacenter license is (if it's a windows vm) (and assuming your deployment and patching is mostly automated), the only cost is cpu cycles and a chunk of ram.

[Gatt]

If you ask me nicely, via the FOI and pay me £100k, in used notes with non consecutive serial numbers, and in a brown envelope, I may consieder your request

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh all right here ya go...

 

2 x DC's - 1 Phys, 1 Virt

1 x FS

1 x TS - Virt

1 x MIS

2 x Web - 1 Phys, 1 Virt

1 x Mail

1 x Sharepoint

1 x SQL / WDS / General Apps

1 x Firewall

[Blackadder]

850 kids

 

2x Data

1x App

1x MIS

3x Proxy (2 VM)

1x Print (VM)

1x Media

1x Backtrack (VM)

1x VM server

1x Securus (if that counts)

 

Almost all going VM over the next year.

Edited June 25, 2010 by Blackadder

[jamesfed]

880 students, ~100 staff.

~130 PCs + ~50 notebooks

 

Current setup is-

3x Server 2k8 (one is mainly a file server) AD/DNS/DHCP

1x Server 2k8 internal web server

1x Server 2k

2x County provided web caches

 

Setup in 3 months time will be-

1x Citrix Xen VM Host with (2x DSs 1x Web server)

1x 2k8 File Server

2x County provided web caches

 

We're scraping the old 2k server (its already running inside virtual box on my desktop anyway!)

[Ric_]

@rayfleming: You've coloured me in the wrong colour!