New Network

[Aaron]

Hi guys

 

Just wanted to ask this question here get some views on this.

 

We have a new legacy network everything is running well but i am looking at backup at the moment. Currently we run 180 xp machines off 1 server our main DC.

 

Server-1 (quad core, 4gb, 500GB raid 5, 1gb network connection)

 

Domain Controller

DNS

DHCP

File Server

Active Directory

Anti Virus

Print Server

Backup

 

I do have one old server which i am also using as a backup to domain controller and active directory.

 

Server - 2 (2 x 1 single core 1ghz processor, 4GB ram, Raid 5 35gb, fibre network connection)

 

Active directory (Backup)

Domain controller (Backup)

 

I am just looking over everything and thinking that i really should have most of this on another server eg:

 

1 server as File Server

1 server Antivirus and Print Server

1 server DNS and DHCP

1 server Domain controller, active directory

1 server Domain Controller, active directory (Backup)

 

would this sound right with everyone? also if possible what specs do you think would be useful? for the likes of the antivirus and print server i am sure this wouldnt need much to run could run this almost on a desktop but just wanted to see what everyone thinks?

[Aaron]

does this sound right or do you think i am just going a bit over kill with everything? we have 770 pupils and 60 staff but numbers could increase for computers over the next few years depending of course on funds

[gaz350]

Hi Aaron, for anyone to help you with you setup we'd need a little bit more info.

 

How many machines you have

What you use them for. We have a lot of big files flying round our network for example.

Budget constraints.? Can you see your budget for next year being 10, 25, 50, or £75000+

Time constraints, Its now less than 1 week before the kids return for us.or is it something you are aiming to role out during term time, next year etc?

 

I just can't imagine anyone being able to help without more info without doing some wild speculation

 

Edit:2hrs sleep last night, sorry just realized you have mentioned number of clients

[SYNACK]

If you want that much seporation of roles I would be looking at Virtulization. Stuff like AV, DNS AD et cdon't use up that much space or power and so a whole extra machine to run them seems excessive unless you are dealing with a much larger network.

 

Personally for futureproofing and redundancy I would be looking towards a small SAN and two virtualization capible servers that the roals could be shared between and migrated to if one of the hosts failed.

[Aaron]

thank you both for getting back to me.

 

Gav.

 

I am not sure i cant see my budget changing it hasnt gone up any in the last 3-4 years to be honest its around 10. All our kids are back next week so it is something that i am trying to look at for a holiday period possibly introduce it more next year. To be honest we really dont have big files going around our network mainly photoshop files and some small movies to be totally honest.

 

Synak.

 

I would like to think about a SAN and moving towards virtulization at some point i totally understand that at some i was going overkill if the likes of the Antivirus, AD, DNS and DHCP didnt use up that much i possibly just keep it on the one server and have a seperate server for the file server which would get hammered the most with constant use.

[Aaron]

I have seen alot of people moving towards the SAN opition i just thought it was very expensive to get setup for additional storage space across a network for a school of only 7-800 pupils? what benefits could be delivered from using a SAN

[SYNACK]

The benifits of using a SAN (you don't need to go for a top of the line Sun S7000 or anything) are that you can have a very large amount of drives attached easily, this gives good redundancy, speed and expandability. The main benifit is that having your storage seporate means that you can store your servers as VMs on this central storage pool and boot them on whichever VM host server you want to meaning that if a host server dies you can concevibly boot the VMs that were on it on another server in seconds or even automaticly rather than having to wait to rebuild or repair the main server. SANs can also be very highly redundant systems with two PSUs and two controller cards allowing for a PSU and controller card to fail while still haveing access to your data.Initially you may want to plan for the SAN at a later date and go for a second server that can handle virtualization, this server can be used as a normal server or even with virtual machines stored locally untill you get a centralized storage solution. I usually go for hp ML380 servers with dial quad cores and a stack of RAM for my virtualization boxes, you can probably even get dual six core ones now. These can handle lots of load and so are quite flexible.Depending on the specs of your current server you may even be able to make that into a pretty reasonable virtualisation host if you wanted by adding a bit of RAM and an additional network card to increase throughput. You could then use something like Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise which allows for 4 virtual instances and simply split up the current roles on the current box.For the services that you are running you can almost certainly get away with running them all on one box but it will probably be cleaner and a bit more reliable/easy to fix with some of the finiky stuff like AV managment seporated away from other core services like AD.

[Aaron]

I was looking at upgrading my current system which will go up to run duel quad core processors with 24gb of ram and more hard drive space. This should be useful for a virtual server although with current budget constraints i still am not 100% certain with the SAN solution even a cheapish solution i was looking at was still going to be costing around 3-4000 which at present is alot of money if taken from my budget.

[gizmo2005]

aaron if you dont mind me asking, how much budget are you allocated and what does this cover, ie new machines, laptops, toner, schools agreement, AV. just trying to figure out how you can do all this is £4,000 is alot of your budget!!!

[Aaron]

hi gizmo

 

its around 10 or so just to cover, parts, toner, printers, switches, cabling and other bits and peices. just out of interest what would others normally get for your budgets if you's dont mind me asking to run a school of around 800 pupils including 60 odd staff

[Achandler]

We have about 900-1000 pupils with about 210 Windows 7 Dekstops and about 25 XP Desktops, we also have about 120 laptops (students and teachers total) within the school, about 40 printers(yes that many!) and about 50 projectors.

If you worked on a policy of replacing things every 5 years you would need about 25k according to my very rough budget work out for this year. I don't know how much I can say but our budget is higher then that but not vastly.

[gaz350]

Same size school and if it wasn't for a new school I Dont know how we could even think about purchasing a SAN and that's with our 50k budget + 8k spares and repairs (we charge departments for toners)

[funkymunky]

SAN can be done relatively cheap if you opt for AoE rather than Fibre Channel. Have a look at Coraid's excellent EtherDrive products and see if they'd be any good for you.

[SYNACK]

We went for a hp msa 2012i using iSCSI (SAN block storage over ethernet) and a fully loaded (with SAS drived and dual psu + dual controller) one cost about £5000 equvilent a year or so ago, given the passing of time and that you guys pay about 60% of what we get charged for gear it could be within your range.