VexRed

Honestly, these guys are utter cowboys. Last year they sent around an email to all of our Primary Schools saying they were doing some upgrade works and the schools would be billed £250 each to cover it, not "we're offering you this service" just a flat "we're doing it". really scummy way to run a company. Git rid, run far! We use Schudio at most of our schools now. Really friendly company to deal with, decent websites, easy to use back-end. Especially for anyone who has ever used WordPress or similar and used to plain text content updates with stylised front-end. For clarity, I do not work for, nor affiliated with, Schudio. I make this recommendation based solely on my customer experience with them. I am happy to make introductions with the company (for which I don't receive a kick-back, finders-fee, nor any commission, favourable rates, etc).

Hyper-V is very easy to use (or learn if you're unfamiliar) and is baked right into MS Server. VMWare is good, but likely overkill for a Primary - even at a secondary I worked at we migrated all our VMs from VirtualBox and VMWare to Hyper-V, the additional cost for licensing couldn't be justified for what was (imo) a negligible benefit. Snapshotting works a lot better on VMWare, though I'm not sure that would be overly applicable to a Primary deployment, so you may not even use of the core things VMW does better than HV

I must agree that the Business class Lenovo devices are some of the most reliable, robust and performant machines I have used, I'd take a refurb Lenovo over many brands mint-in-box. IMHO they're second only to Dell for reliability. Their 'domestic' grade products aren't nearly as good, but if you're buying for a business environment, never buy consumer grade. Judging a consumer grade product for their commercial application is like judging the performance of a new Unleaded Petrol by trying it in your Diesel engine - it looks the same, it serves the same function, but it is not designed for it's intended purpose and won't work. (Disclaimer, I know that isn't quite true for Diesel engines using Petrol...) I've bought from ICT Direct in the past, happy with the product and service.

Hi, New to the forums, Education and Tech for nearly 15 years, medium level of experience / knowledge, always happy to help whenever I can. Thanks! VR