Soulfish

We're based in the South East - Kent/Sussex area

I've been asked to investigate alternative ways of purchasing SIMS/SIMS Support/SIMS Training other than via our LEA. Due to the various cost cutting measures (and lots of behind the scenes politics!) we're currently looking at the viability and costs involved with opting out of most LEA provided services. SIMS is one of the areas that I've been asked to look at so here I am So does anyone know a provider (other than Capita direct) that would be able to provide SIMS/SIMS support to us? I wasn't sure if the various accredited support providers around the country were tied to only operating in a specific region, or what other providers are out there!

XenApp is all about application virtualisation rather than VDI/desktop virtualisation. Desktop virtualisation needs however are all based around giving the same type of experience as a physical computer. So you're looking at USB and audio redirection, full screen HD video, no lag etc. Systems like XenDesktop and View provide various protocols and other bits of "magic" to get things to work quite well

We used FOG for about 18 months and it was brilliant. Amazing what you can do with it! We've now moved to using SCCM as it was very simple to use to get a single hardware independent image setup

Congratulations Kim

Looking forward to the final release of this . We've just moved to using Spiceworks for our IT helpdesk, and looking forward to all the nice new features

Logitech Harmony remotes are great. They connect to a PC, you tell it make/model and it programs its self . If they don't have the device you can still self-program, but I haven't found a device that it didn't work with. There's a huge range of devices. We tend to use the 300i which is around £25, but they can cost up to £250

Ohhh now that sounds perfect . Been trying to think of ways to convince MS to let us license using a MS Campus agreement rather than a Schools agreement, but if they're going to let us use FTE from March then I won't bother

We have 1 printer GPP that deploys all printers based on PC location (using loopback processing). To stop the profiles filling with printers the very first GPP that's applied is remove all existing printer connections, then the remaining printers are processed. Works for us We are however having some other issues with W7/GPOs/GPPs/Printers, but that's for another thread!

Your RBC may prevent you from accessing external NTP servers. I know SEGfL does. They provide a NTP server that can be used instead.

Secondary school with around 1050 on roll: Every teacher has a laptop PC in every room for registration/smartboard 1 x 34 PC Suite 3 x 30 PC Suites 1 x 28 PC Subject Cluster 6 x 15 PC Subject Clusters 1 x 16 Netbook Laptop trolley Many other PCs in classrooms etc.

It sounds like the Netgear switches are having a hard time coping with traffic flow, and so are taking a while to respond to the ping request. Remember that ICMP packets have the lowest priority so will be dealt with last. Have you looked at the number of packets/amount of bandwidth that the Netgear switches are receiving?

To be honest the Cisco wireless system is shockingly poor compared to the rest of the competition. After seeing Ruckus, Xirus, Aruba, Meru etc the Cisco system just doesn't seem great. We settled on Ruckus in the end as it provides everything we want and more, while giving us a decent WiFi connection in 95% of the school. If we wanted to do anything really fancy (and Ruckus can do a hell of a lot anyway) then we'd be looking to do it with our Juniper switches/Juniper Firewall/Smoothwall Proxy.

About 500 machines and 1 W7 image deployed using SCCM 2007 R2 SP2 w/ MDT 2010 (god thats a mouthful!). Grabs the drivers needed from our driver repository (Dell even provide handy driver packs for direct import into SCCM ), and installs the list of applications that we have. We can even customise the applications that are installed during the imaging process based on PC name/MAC/hardware type/many other options.

TechNet gives you access to virtually all MS software for use within a test environment only. It's cheap as lots of people need access to various MS products so that they can test/play with them, and may not be able to afford full copies of everything. Do remember that the license is very restricted and you cannot use the software in a live/production environment

Ok - they can come and do my network cabling for me

The school caretaker built the partition for our server room. As you say a few bits of timber, some plasterboard and some nails. They did also get it plastered to finish it off .

We've moved over to using Spiceworks now because of problems getting things working.

I at least had that sort of discussion with Netapp before we purchased. For some reason they just didn't want to be competitive compared to everyone else. It was a little crazy how the FAS2040 was actually more powerful than the FAS2050 - strange naming system!

If you search Uniservity on these forums you'll see a lot of "heated" discussion around the platform. Personally I found it to be unintuitive and very difficult to use, coupled with being extremely slow. I know that a number of secondarys in East Sussex have now moved away from the platform to others such as Moodle. As you're unlikely to be able to move learning platform as this stage I'd see about talking to some of the people at East Sussex that run the system and get them to point you at schools showing good practise. I know they like to trot them out at every conference to show how good the platform is, so there are some that are using it successfully

We've had some fun times with W7 and deploying printers. After eventually getting GPP to deploy printers we found that some machines wouldn't deploy some printers at all - despite deploying other printers in the same policy. That issue seems to have resolved its self, but now we've got a weird issue where printers will disappear part way through a users session. I suspect its something to do with http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-7/60087-win-7-dhcp-netlogon-firewall-microsoft-confirm-bug.html, and printers to reapplying correctly when updated by GPP as we're getting all of the same error messages.

They're STEC ZeusIOPS SSDs, so no idea what optimisations (if any!) have been done by STEC. We're about to use 6 of them to act as extended cache for the system using the new EMC FAST Cache system that they've just released. Any additional drives are being used in a standard RAID group for very fast access to certain databases/VDI images. I'm a big believer in the Sun/Oracle storage systems - I can safely say that currently the S7000 was a million times easier to setup and start using. Just a shame that Oracle couldn't discount to the same level as EMC

Well they've been willing to give us the earth to get our business (I have a stack of 200gb SSDs next to me that I need to install ), but it's certainly not the most straightforward system in the world! Doesn't help that from my understanding of things it's three separate systems that are glued together to give NAS + SAN functionality. Still once I actually manage to find the download for their new "unified" management tool I'll let you know how good it is

Hahahaha that'd make a great photo

I wish they were silly cheap when we tendered for our new storage system a few months ago . Still a rack full of EMC gear is still pretty nice