Soulfish

I'd join James in arguing that VDI can work, in the correct environment with the correct setup. I'm not saying your setup was bad/incorrect (from the sounds of it the reverse is quite true!), but since implementing a 100 seat XenDesktop deployment this September it's been great. There have been some teething problems (mainly due to single points of failure) that have been worked out, but while the system has been running it's been great. In fact we now routinely sub out-of-action PCs with Wyse Xenith zero-clients while they're being repaired by Dell. We've found that the thin client system we have in place is capable of coping with everything that's been thrown at it - including basic audio and image editing, and basic CAD work. Now I'd be willing to accept that our experience is slightly different because we've only just implemented this system and there's been a huge amount of development in two years, I also wasn't a fan of VMWares VDI and app virtualisation solutions compared to Citrix so this isn't an apples to apples comparison. For us the costs for a VDI deployment and a PC deployment are pretty similar. Ok the VDI actually worked out cheaper (for us!) but we've found the savings don't come in the hardware, or (supposedly) long lifecycle of the thin clients but in the reduced energy consumption, the reduced man hours needed to maintain the clients and the simplicity they provide. It takes us roughly 2 minutes to provision a new computer anywhere in the school - that's from getting the box to having a working unit on the desk, and we have the bonus that the clients are tiny . The major bonus for us was the remote working aspect - the fact that we can provide a desktop to anyone with (theoretically) all of the same software they use in school? Great I will agree with you however that VDI is not for everyone, nor suitable for every school. I know plenty I wouldn't try it in. Because of our mix of applications and how our clients are used VDI makes sense for a large amount of our install base, but even knowing that there are challenges and changing use patterns to consider. VDI helps, but I wouldn't consider it a silver bullet and I wouldn't look on it as being cheaper than a PC - just different, with a different use-case. The final (very rambling) thought I'll leave on is 1-1 computing initiatives. I know we're being pushed that way, and while I dislike it I can see laptops/netbooks/tablets being the next thing that every child is equiped with. VDI does help to provide a unified desktop to every person, regardless of the equipment they are using. Bring your own PC (BYoPC) is becoming big in the workplace and will trickle down to schools. I can see a good learning platform, application virtualisation and VDI all helping immensely with that. It's also one of the reasons we decided to try VDI ourselves

Weren't they the models they launched last year around BETT then had to withdraw because they couldn't get the 3000 lumens model working correctly?

Got to be my Amazon Kindle. In 3-4 months it's been used all around the world, and the free 3G access is brilliant for cheap access to email while away

Zmanda (Zmanda: The Leader in Open Source Backup & Cloud Backup) is one possibility, although if you want to backup the ESX VMs you're probably better off looking at an ESX backup product like Veeam.

For us it was both. From a 10k SAS drive you can get around 150 IOPs. The 7110 had 14 available for data giving a max sustained IOP load of around 2100. This doesn't take into account things like the L1ARC (RAM Cache) that ZFS makes use of, but it's a reasonable guestimate. We were pushing 2100+ constantly. Do bear in mind that we were running numerous SQL and Exchange servers off of the box. Unfortunately the fact that we were starting to push the limits of what we could expect (to be honest I'd expected it to give out long before it did!), and the fact we just didn't have enough disk space meant we had to get a new SAN. The 7110 was always a temp solution for us, but it lasted a lot longer than expected and performed a lot better than we were expecting. The 7120 is even better, and I believe now has SSDs which greatly help to increase the performance. I'd expect the 7120 would have eaten up the workload of our 7110, asked for seconds and still be hungry for more .

+1 on this. I've been waiting for an alternative to IE that provides an MSI and GPO support. Now Google have stepped us it's time for me to test it out and see if we're able to lock the Chrome install down enough that we can allow access to all Staff and Students

Our 7110 (2tb! ) was handling roughly 20 VMs + serving files to roughly 500 computers until recently. It coped (just!), however because we were space constrained we moved to a new EMC SAN. Would have liked one of the new S7000's, but they weren't out at the time and EMC offered stupidly low pricing. Our VMs were connected over 4 x 1gbe links and CIFS over another 4 x 1gbe links. To be honest it was a bit overkill, and would have worked perfectly over half the number of links for each .

Wasn't it more like "Ohhh what does this do.....Crap it's not working anymore!" <5 minutes later after Stjeles come over> "Honestly it just stopped working on us!" And I'm going to be there the Friday and Saturday with any luck .

Including the very nice Forefront Online Exchange antivirus and spam filtering that we're just deploying

+1 on West Wing. One of the best TV series I've had the pleasure to watch and Leo's funeral still makes me well up

To me it looks like you have an awful lot of delete printer connection GPPs. Typically I have 1 delete printer connections as the first GPP in the list, and then have all the add printers below that. Ensures that printers are wiped and then applied

The S7000 series is good, and I'd talk to the Cutter Project to get good pricing and great support. I've never been a big fan of the MD series of Dell SANs, although the Equallogic range is quite nice. As you've mentioned SAN replication is certainly the ultimate aim for alot of people to get a (theoretically) faultless system, but can be very expensive. One cheaper alternative would be to have a second smaller/cheaper SAN/NAS (NFS is great for hosting virtual hard disk images ) and to back the vmdks/vhd files up to that. It wouldn't give you up to the second realtime updates, but if combined with a snapshot aware backup system/script could give you hourly or so updates of the main servers you need to keep up without the massive cost of a second SAN.

We're running Moodle on 2 servers. One for the frontend (Apache on CentOS 5.4), the other for the DB (MySQL on CentOS 5.4). Both are VMs running ontop of XenServer 5.6 with 2-CPUS and 4gb RAM.

+1 on this. Our LEA provides filtering, firewall, access to the various NGN resources and spam/antivirus mail checking (through their Cisco IronPort). We already use our own filtering (Smoothwall), have our own firewall (Juniper SRX240), and are about to move our spam/antivirus checking to MS Forefront Exchange Online. The only thing we're unable to replace/replicate like for like is the NGN resources, but having talked it through with everyone they're not resources we use so aren't that fussed with loosing access to them. Because of the services we already use, the fact that the NGN resources are unnecessary for us and that we're able to get a better connection cheaper it's a no-brainer for us to move

Now I'm tempted to rename our spiceworks server....hmmm

Eve was for a while my game of choice. I played from Alpha and for the first year and a bit after release. Although I ended up moving away from the game as I didn't have the time to dedicate to it . Having been involved with the community for 4-5 years (I followed it for a loooong time!) I keep thinking of getting back into it, but all the corporations I remember seem to have disappeared . I do wonder if my original character is still sitting on a server somewhere

Well we're just in the process of going it alone here. The notice should be going in to our LEA this week . We're planning to go for a 30mb/s on a 100mb/s bearer through Opal. We already use Smoothwall for filtering and we have a Juniper SRX240 firewall. Having had pricing from over 15 providers we found there to be a big variation in price, partly down to providers not wanting the business and also down to how far you are from their nearest POP. The further away you are the more it costs to install the connection, the higher the cost is likely to be. If you already have fibre in place then it may be cheaper to install, but it really depends on who's providing the current connection and if you're new provider can reuse the circuit/ducting. I hope that helps! EDIT: Just realised I forgot to add our costs to the above! Currently best price we're getting is around 9.5k/year for 30mb/s on 100mb/s with 0 install cost including a managed router. Best price for 100mb/s on 100mb/s was around £16k with 1k install. Both of those come with backup ADSL connections with auto-failover

We've already had quotes back from Zen, and while the price wasn't bad it's still about 40% more than Opal

Cheers for the answers everyone . Based on all of the above I think we're probably going to be going with Opal for our leased line - unless someone is able to better their offer!

We'll we've just gone from a Sun 7110 to an EMC Celerra NS-480, so I can offer some comparisions between the two systems if you like . Firstly I'd just like to say that we're 100% happy with the Sun 7110. It's an excellent unit, it had just reached 100% capacity! If the Oracle pricing had been keener (something I believe has been rectified) we would have jumped at the chance of a 7310/7410, but unfortunately EMC came along and undercut everyone by a significant margin . The Sun system is without a shadow of a doubt the easier system to work with. The Celerra is very very very complicated. I'm just very glad that EMC set it all up! The web interface for the Celerra is OK. It's not quite as good as the Sun system, but it's still pretty easy to move around. It's not really fair to directly compare performance between our two systems (the Celerra has 3tb of SSDs!), but I will say that we've been more than happy with the performance we got from the 7110. It's happily serving files for all staff and students (1100 users), as well as acting as an NFS store for alot of VMs (around 20). If I was offered a swapout of our Celerra for a like-for-like Sun model I'd almost certainly take it. The EMC Celerra is a nice bit of kit, but to be honest it's just too complicated! That and I'm not overly keen on EMCs snapshotting model

We're 99.99% sure that we're going to move our internet connection away from our county council after doing a cost/benefit analysis of being connected to the county network/NGN. Currently Opal are working out about 10% cheaper than we pay for our NGN connection. Instead of having a 30mbit connection that we can barely use since all bandwidth is shared with all schools, no SLA and no backup we'd have a guaranteed speeds, a 99.99% SLA and a backup ADSL connection with auto-failover of all IPs and services. I was just wondering if anyone had used Opal for their leased lines (or even business ADSL!) and how they found the service?

Any of the Canon Lide range of scanners. It's what we use here and they work fine with both

I have to say that Natwests use of two-factor authentication makes most sense to me. You're only asked to use the card reader if you are adding a new payee, and the first time you pay that new payee. If the payee already exists and you have already paid them you don't require the card reader, and when you login you don't require the card reader. Nationwide however has a system that constantly frustrates me. Even more so now that they're making it a requirement that you use your card reader to login, and are required to use the card reader for each and every transaction.

Best thing to do is to use the new 2008 R2 migration tools. They allow you to easily migrate server roles from a server running 2003/2008 to a 2008 R2 box. Have a look at DHCP Server Migration Guide for the DHCP guide

That's very true of course. Although I suspect you could do something similar with some of the IBM blade centers I've seen. Not sure how the cost would compare since I've not seen pricing on either .