SkreeM1980

Absoloutley, VDI is a fantastic solution, but as with most IT solutions it's not a fit for everything. We have a large VDI deployment, but when we started deploying it I knew that it would not fit into every location. We now have 300+ Thin Client devices connecting to the VDI, but i also still have about 100 traditional desktop PC's in IT Suites/Open Access areas to cope with the "more demanding" applications Such as 2D/3D CAD & Video/Photo Editing and with the technology where it is i wouldn't consider changing this. My next step is to start using VDI in staff offices, but again it will be a mixed/balanced deployment to allow/ensure flexibility. Talking about falling for the salesman's pitch, yes I did fall for it, but not in terms of thinking it could do everything, just some of the multimedia performance and managability side, not following updates from VMWare and out TC manufacturer I'm where i expected to be, but that is nearly 2 years down the line from our initial deployment. Skr

Think i may have been wrong, can't find the manual right now, it's been here for about 4 years now, but was approx £4500 when new and is very shiny. We actually have 2 safes, each capacity about 100 tapes, mon-thurs are reasonably local to the server room and Fri/Weekend tapes are at the 2.5km site Quite possibly, but i used to be from commercial IT, and if the data hadn't been available to recover the companies would have probably been bust, this happened to quite a few after buncefield explosion. Although the premises etc were insured they couldn't trade without data and had cashflow nightmares. Education is different i know, but it is still a business with cashflow, and products (courses) and customers (pupils/students) so i try to apply similar logic. Probably, we also probably have different budgets and different priorities from management. This is most likley a scale thing, i have a team of 5 including mself so virtually no chance of no-one being in. Then it is a scheduled job on helpdesk system to change tapes and part of our morning routine to check back-up. Yes it has been quite interesting. Skr

Totally agree, more servers is a better option, just out of curiosity are you using 32 or 64bit VM's for your guests. We had some amazing results with 64Bit TS's, so may more users on a server with more available resources.

I looked at the hardware requirements for sketchup, and then advised staff that we were unable to put it onto the VDI environment. there is no way my VDI has that type of GFX performance, without even thinking about the processor caps etc

Very interesting, i would also research what the DNS registration refresh interval is on the problem servers. this could be a scavenging issues as your timeouts are quite low.

Fireproof safes in the server room are 100% useless, fireproof safes carefully placed with seperation from the server room and not on the 3rd floor can be useful. Ours are minimum 8hrs burn time and are strategically placed near the perminter of buildings. We have one in the next building and then one on the other side of site, 2.5km is not wholly offsite backup but it is 'acceptable' at the moment. Yes, have you seen the price of tape? Our system uses 163 tapes for a full yearly rotation at the moment, total capacity of 65Tb uncompressed. Cost for full set of tapes is under 3k if i was to replace all each year. I wouldn't replace tapes only used once a year (quarterly, annual) each year, and would only replace monthly tapes every 2 years. Weekly tapes, every year definately. You find me a NAS that can do 65Tb for that cost? Disk to Disk to Tape - Yeah brilliant, Need about 8-10 Tb and can backup daily and go to tape once a week, reduce costs on tape and make life easier for restores. But with the tape rotation if i want to recover say a database from before the end of the last financial year I can.

Mandatory profile could be configured in GPO i think?? (Know TS mandatory profiles can be) Very worth checking, as the profile could contain the settings in the registry.

Without looking at everything .. I can't be certain, however most likley yes. This is probably a legacy setting from the domain migration. Send me a couple of screenshots of excatly where you mean and i can maybe be more helpful. Back to your original proxy problem ... what type of user profiles do you use? Is it possibly hidden in the registry of the profile. I know at one stage we edited the registry of our mandatory profile (Regedit>file>Load Hive>Browse to \\serverpath\profileshare\ntuser.man) to ensure the correct settings were there too just incase of GPO applying issues. Skr

Disk based backup is fantastic for all the reasons you mention, but it falls down on the ability to take the backup offsite, and the ability to store it in a fireproof state. Unless you are using expensive SSD's transporting hard disks doesn't make for a relliable solution due to the moving parts. Disk to Disk to Tape is the way I want to go, disk backup and restore is fast, but storage of a Grandfather/Father/Son system for archival and retrieval involves many many disks and tape becomes much more cost effective. Yes but what if... aircraft crash? Arson attack on school ... both buildings? How far apart are your buildings? I've got a 2nd server room across site (2.5km away) thats probably ok ... but you can never be sure ... I'm sure there where many companies in buncefield saying .. 100m is far enough away. Just to note, i've used offsite internet backup before and i'm not a big fan, ok for the odd file etc, but a full server restore over internet bandwidth is not a pleasant thought! Skr

we use server assist, not free but very nice and UK based support and development. have found issues with it, and ended up with fixed builds by the next day before. Server Monitoring and Network Monitoring for Windows, Linux, applications and SNMP

Have you got the Volume on the storage configured to allow multiple iSCSI connections? Also how are you connecting to if from the guest OS, it it mapped through hyper-v as a physical disk or using a windows inbuilt iSCSI connection? Skr

I would strongly recommend that you put the network subnets into AD sites and services, even if you only have one subnet on 1 site, it's still "The Right Thing to do" From a relliability and resillience point of view it would be best if you had 2 DNS servers, DNS should automatically be installed with the DC role on the 2008 servers so it's probably already there, have a check. May also reduce the load on a single server if there were 2. Skr

2 remote agent licences should be around £350 they are not expensive until you start adding the Advanced Open File and SQL/Exchange agents. It is much more cost effective to backup multiple servers from 1 than backup each server individually cos you can make a massive saving on the backup hardware. we currently backup 35-40 servers from a single backup exec and it usually works a treat. although the only time a backup isn't running is 10:00 - 17:30 weekdays Skr

We have this problem with our Administrator account, there are no policies setting proxy for administrator and no scripts, however when we login as admin and go to enable proxy for machines which aren't routed it has the address of our 8yr old ISA server, no idea where it is coming from, have searched and searched. This includes if we login on a vanilla install machine.

I'm thinking of doing this over the summer, how many printers have you got working this way .. seems like a really big job for our 60odd network printers, epescially thinking about itemlevel target and remove when outside of target. I've read some really good articles on it though and very looking forward to getting rid of the 3mile long script we use at the moment Skr

Hi, Your DNS entries are correct, all the DC's in the site should show up in the site name as this is where is queried to find DC's to process logon's. Have you got all the subnets and stuff configured properly in AD Sites & Services, this could result in the error on printserver with DC diag. Also which DNS servers are each of the DC's pointing at? Is one of your servers particularly slower than the others normally, we had a slow startup problem at one stage and found it was one DC causing the problem. We now run only 2 DC's for 1000 PC's on the site instead of 3. The other things that can affect the time taken for the computers to pass Applying computer settings are the group policies check this thread of advice http:// http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-server-2000-2003/74601-gpo-bloat.html Skr

Isn't quite right. From memory it is Net use S: /Delete /Yes [/Code] But that would need to be for each mapping ... you could also use [code] net use * /delete /yes at the top of the batch file. Skr

We have loads of GPO's and some did cause problems with slowing logon times. The things we did that helped 1) Disable User/Computer configuration - If a GPO only has user settings then disable to computer settings(and vice versa), this is especially important for GPO's linked high up the tree. 2) Reduce Security filtering, ensure that GPO's are applied to the best OU's and don't use security filtering where possible. This can depend strongly on your OU structure 3) Don't duplicate settings between GP's that all apply to the same set of Objects, there is no need to set Hide the control panel 4 times in user policies 4) Remove ADM templates that aren't in use from each GPO, this took a while, but really made a difference, the ADM's get included in the GPO which increases the size and therefore the download time. we reduced our average GP folder from 2mb to under 500k. By default there are a bout 4 ADM's in each policy. if it is a software installation policy it doesn't need any of them. 5) WMI filtering really affects the processing speed of GPO, don't use it unless you really have to. Security filtering is OK and OU Targeting is best. Hope this helps you out. Skr

You could put a startup script on a GPO for the administrator that had a logoff command after a specified wait

Outlook should maintain the setting. I would suggest that you have something (script or prf or similar) that is setting it on startup rather than losing the setting. Although check your eventlogs for any profile errors just in case. Skr

We use mandatory network profile, all we did to seup was login as a user with a romaing profile path, set it up how we wanted and then change the permissions to everyone and rename ntuser.dat to ntuser.man then put the .v2 in the same location as the existing student mandatory profile. Didn't need to use the copy feature. Minor advice with 7, always delete profiles from the applet rather than deleting the folder from Users as it keeps the registry and stops it downloading/creating profile in future. Skr

You could try updating/reinstallling WSH on the affected machines, i've had a few times where it can become messed up. There should be a download on the MS site ... Type Windows Script Host in the search Skr

The FSMT is fine, there are a couple of gotcha's around the folder naming, but it is easily resolved if you do a find replace through the XML file generated before doing the migration for real, is very good at maintaing permissions on NTFS and Shares, i think there's also something about all files being read only that happened to me one of the times i used it, but it was a while asgo now. Skr

Phew, that one looks pretty damned complicated! love they way that the security descriptor has smiliey's in though LOL. We do have papercut too, i haven't yet played around with using it for permissions on printers, mostly we have it for tracking usage and managing print release on the MFD's. Is it easy to do permissions with? Skr

Hi, I am looking for a way to add a deny entry to the permissions of all printers on a print server and any printers that are added afterwards. We have introduced a staff only print server for the printers in offices and i want to make sure that if somehow a student managed to add a printer although this is also restricted that they would not be able to print to any of them. Previously when we had a mixed use print server we configured it on the individual printers, however i'm not keen on doing that to the 40 printers now on the new server and remembering any in future. It's kind of like i would like to add the permission to the parent folder and have it inherit, but i can't find that place. I checked Server Properties but there are no security options there. Thanks Skr