Soulfish

I'd advise haggling with Netsupport. It's a good product, and I know they're always willing to do a deal

Well since no one won the draw looks like it's an even bigger amount on Friday!

Toshiba R700 R700 Charger Notebook A3 site building plans iPhone cable Keys (car, work, home) P45 Payslip iPhone headphones Mints Screwdriver Ubuntu LiveCD 4 USB Sticks More pens then I can be bothered to count Pages of IT budgets Meeting minutes More building plans! Furniture plans Endless pages of quotes and tender responses

Not that I've thought about it much...but like localzuk I'd be keeping 10-20 mil back to spend now and on various projects/properties (of course I'd be building the ultimate geeky house!)/cars/holidays/stuff with the remaining amount going into a various investments split between 2 or 3 private banks, and since £85 mil pushes you into ultra high net worth category you should get some banks very interested . I'd try to never touch the capital that's been invested, instead living off of a fixed percentage of the yearly income from the investments (somewhere between 10-50% dependant on returns!), with remaining interest being reinvested. That would all be controlled by some form of trust to make it easier to pay money out to family/dependants etc. Ohh and I'd probably still continue working. I actually really like the work that I'm doing and find it interesting, but I would stop taking salary and get them to hire someone to sit below me so that if I decided I was going away for a few weeks there wouldn't be a problem I haven't though about it much of course

It sounds like you were using Enterprise Plus trial licensing or similar and now that the trial has expired it's refusing to bring the VM backup. As others have said don't assign more vCPUs than you need. This is true for all VM platforms (VMware/Citrix/MS/KVM etc), as the VM will have to wait for the same number of physical cores to be available for it to run anything. Best practise is to start with 1vCPU unless you really know you're going to need more. Having done the VMware VCP and Citrix CCA courses its the same explanation from both I've never seen a virtual machine need more than 4 vCPU, and to be honest particularly with things like terminal servers it's much better to bring up extra servers and spread the load than to try and add resources to a heavily used server.

Need to find out if I can attend this. Building handover for us is that week so depending on various things happening (power, data, telephones being in place!) I may not be able to come

No we are definitely using SIMS/FMS for personal/HR purposes, while using a separate system for all financial transactions.

To be honest pretty much everything can be virtualised if you can allocate appropriate resources to it. I've virtualised, SQL/Exchange/Sharepoint/SCCM/SCOM/DCs/SIMS/DNS/DHCP/Print Servers/File servers etc all without a problem. You just need to make sure that each has adequate vCPU(s)(remembering that 2+ vCPUs isn't always better than 1 vCPU!) and an adequate amount of RAM. One thing that's also normally overlooked (and results in poor VM performance) is making sure that your disks (whether thats a NAS/SAN array or local disk) is up to handling the IOPs and throughput you need for the number of VMs your going to be running. I like to keep one physical DC (with DNS) so you don't have everything in one basket, but other than that I don't tend to run physical servers any longer. The benefits of a virtualised system (better resource utilisation, improved DR/HA, easier to backup etc) outweigh any small loss in performance you may find, and to be honest I haven't seen any loss in performance in the virtualised systems that I'm running.

As a new academy we're going with PSFinancials as well. Unfortunately we're still using SIMS/FMS for personal as theres no budget (yet!) for a decent HR system. Have to say the PS Financials system looks very good.

Syscap, Investec and CHG Meridian are the big three in schools, and I believe Investec and CHG Meridian have qualified within various EU procurement frameworks to cover you from that angle. I've dealt with CHG before and they were very helpful, and actually the county finance department at my last school were also very helpful with putting me in touch with the correct people at different leasing companies that they approved for schools to use

PowerDsine/Microsemi are the PoE injectors/PoE midpans to get . They provide their products OEM to lots of companies and produce the components for lots of the PoE switches out there. Lots of different options from single port upto 24 port and both 802.3af and 802.3at as well as gigabit compatibility - Manufacture Diodes, IGBTs, LED Driver, Small Signal & Analog, RF Power, SCR, WLAN Power Amplifier, Backlight Inverter, CCFL Inverter, Power Modules, RF Transistors, Power Over Ethernet, PoE, PoE IC

Could you do a test on 2.4 vs 5ghz performance? And if you could get multiple APs a roaming test would be great

We're just looking at site coverage for a new build and we're talking to Ruckus, Aerohive, Meru and Extricom. I think all four have things they bring to the table, and all have their pros and cons. I think Aerohive have a very innovative product, being fairly new to market that looks like it works quite well. Ruckus I've used previously and is good value and has some features, while Meru and Extricom are both single channel architectures with their set of benefits. In some ways I do believe any of the four would work, some better than others, but it's trying to find the best fit for your environment which can only really be done with some real world testing.

Do you have to pay your RBC for connectivity this year? Yes. We're a new academy and we're being ported straight onto the new Virgin LGfL network What RBC are you with? LGfL - London Grid for learning How much are they asking? It's about £8,000 this year (I don't have the figures to hand right now), but price is based on pupil numbers as well as bandwidth. Because we're starting small we get it quite cheap What speed will you get for that? 100mbit (possibility to increase higher for limited extra cost) Are you considering leaving or staying with your RBC in the future because of its pricing? Staying - currently cheapest option for us as a brand new academy that is yet to open Have you already left your RBC and for what reasons? Nope not yet

Happy birthday Ric

+1 - I've dealt with Borri before (in fact we had a very similar system to John ) and found them excellent

Compellents ZNAS is just Nexenta rebadged connecting back through to the normal compellent infrastructure . I don't know if it'll do what you want (it's based on OpenSolaris) but have you looked at the Oracle S7000 range? Used to be Sun open storage. A few people here (including myself) have used them and they're pretty decent boxes (on the whole!).

Probably - I don't think any of the staff currently live in Hammersmith! I know I certainly don't

We didn't pay that for them however . The entire Juniper solution cost less than Extreme, HP, 3Com and Cisco - .

My last school was Juniper EX4200's at the edge and two Juniper EX8208 in the core. Now that's a monster switch

Cisco 3750's are our edge switches. We have a Cisco 4510R+E in the core.

It can natively view PDFs, but it's not great. I prefer to convert them using Calibre (think of it a bit like a book verison of iTunes!) and then move them across to my Kindle.

You won't regret getting one! We've now got four 3G kindles in our family and everyone loves them . They're great for going abroad as well because the 3G just works and is great for checking email while on the move

And to answer the original question properly - this is how I normally manage downtime. There are occasional bits that I may do out of hours during term, but I have quite a good relationship with my line manager so could reclaim TOIL during the holidays for this sort of thing. I'll have to remember tha analogy for future reference . And I follow a similar estimation rule - much better to deliver early and be thanked than deliver ontime/late and get complaints!

HP Servers, HP EVA 6400 storage, Cisco networking and IP phone system, VMWare virtualisation, Dell T3500 workstations, Apple iMacs for music/video edit and a whole raft of "creative media" stuff (tv studio, recording studios, radio studio etc)