A new server

[Quillyn]

Picked up a mess of a school, its server unlicensed, unreliable and over loaded, looking for some recommendations for a replacement. Currently its ...

 

A Core duo with 6gig of ram (7years old) 2003

Running services for 16 thin clients

DHCP

Anti-virus management

Sims FMS & .net for 4 clients

Windows patch management

Schools main file share (0.5 gig expected expansion in next 3 years to 2gig) non raid.

 

Presently the school runs no notable active directory I would like the new server to take this role for the 80 machines on the network.

 

Presently I have been given £5,000 from the capital budget to try and sort the server out. I am thinking visualization is the way to go do people have any recommendations of the best way of going about this?

 

Any help greatly appreciated.

[kmount]

I'd be looking at buying two reasonable servers as virtualisation hosts for certain.

 

Couple of boxes with Windows Datacenter (or Enterprise if you only need a few VMs on each box) and breaking your roles down and split across the two boxes so you end up with better performance and resiliency.

 

The current server could be a physical DC / backup server.

 

£5k's quite a chunk of cash, should be able to pick up some reasonable boxes for that and sort your licensing out.

 

Quite a lot of network managers on here have done this on shoe string budgets too, I'll let them tell their stories

[john]

Absolutely agree with Kim, two servers and virtualisation is the way forward for this money and needs of your place.

 

Something from HP will be a good one, next month is a good month to buy from HP historically as its end of the financial year so are often willing to give stupid discounts, I got about 77% off all my SAS drives and ram when I got mine 2 years ago which was a great saving at that time

 

You should get for that money a nice pair of HP DL360 or even DL380s if you strike a hard bargain with your reseller

[glennda]

I got 2 dl360 g6s dual 6 core xeons with 2 72gb drives.for about 4.8k so a slightly less powerful version with enough disks for your requirements probably single six core xeons with 12gb like this HP ProLiant DL360 G7 E5649 1P 12GB-R SFF SAS 460W PS Server/TV (640014-425) specifications - HP Small & Medium Business products and some sas drives for 5k servers and cals on an ees agreement shouldn't be to much either.

 

Toby