Soulfish

I'm not sure she'd appreciate that - although it is a tempting idea!

I'd love to come but need to double check with the other half first

That really is witchcraft! I want!

Cheers for the information . The enterprise CAL suite includes both the standard and enterprise OCS cals - one of the reasons for seriously looking at OCS. I suspect it may be fairly cheap for us to implement compared to other IP phone options.

With the changes we're making to our schools agreement at our renewal this summer we actually get the OCS CALs included - only additional cost I can see is the server? As per normal MS Schools agreement licensing it's pretty cheap . What sort of setup do you need to run all OCS without a PBX (number of OCS servers etc)? Also what phones are you using with OCS?

+1 I'd be very interested to know how your using it and what features your making use of

Oracle virtulisation is based around Xen (like Citrix XenServer) so should be fairly good in that regard. They bought virtual iron a while ago for their management toolset, and being the big company that they are I know they don't want it to fail. Will be interesting to see how they combine the various Sun virtulisation offerings into the mix as well

Happy Birthday

I'm very interested in using it to replace our 20yr old PBX system when we eventually move to IP phones, but haven't had a chance to really explore

To be honest I'm not so fussed about having a windows server version. Whatever solution we use it'll end up on it's own server and Windows or Linux is no great shakes . A D2D2T backup appliance running bacula that supported the S7000 however - that I'd be interested in

While browsing around previously I've also found Sun Ray User Group which seems to have a lot of info around the Sun Ray system

I've had a play with the advanced scripting to change the print cost for staff printing to a lesser rate then students. Worked perfectly and was really easy to use

I've been looking at Bacula, MS DPM and Zamanda as possible alternatives to Backup Exec so would be great news if Bacula integrated with the S7000

Personally for a site that needed 99.999%+ uptime then I'd seriously be looking at some form of clustered hosting. I'd likely look at using something like the Amazon elastic compute cloud to easily run multiple web servers across a number of datacentres, and when needed, increase the capacity at the touch of a button

Well I bought this last night via steam but haven't had a chance to play yet Hoping to get some time to play this weekend

You have to be a paid employee to count as staff under the schools agreement unfortunately

You know you want to come down to this session really . After all the hassle Ric_ seems to be having deploying W7 with SCCM I think it may be worth it just for that session.

Nothing - just they don't support any of the "special" features that you get with StorageLink

Just need better support from sun on using the s7000 range with xenserver . Although this may happen as the oracle hypervisor is based on xen as well

Memory over-provisioning through memory ballooning, automated workload balancing, better snapshots of VMs + a few other things. There's a beta out now (and more info) at Citrix XenServer 5.6 Beta Program

You don't have to have the Advantage Sub, but it's good if you want the new features. For example my SA sub expires mid-April, but I'm renewing it because I want the new stuff in 5.6 that's likely to be released in May Just looking at the Citrix Campus agreement and that's looking very expensive (more than our MS Schools agreement!)

We also have Citrix XenServer with Citrix Essentials Enterprise for XenServer. Xenserver its self is free, but you have to pay for Essentials. I think that's around £900ish/server. It's a one off fee for the license and that includes something called Subscription Advantage which gives you free updates/upgrades for a year. If you want to continue with that (so you can always use the latest versions) it's about £160ish/server/year.

Tempted by the W7 Deployment day on 14th April. Only problem is we've got some IWBs being installed that day as well and I'm supposed to be there to supervise

We've just changed ours so that students have the following format: [year of y7 entry][initials from all first and middle names][surname] So James Andrew Blogs who started year 7 in 2009 would be 09jablogs whereas Harry Liam Smith who joined year 8 in 2009 would be 08hlsmith. Staff is a mix of two formats. The majority are [salutation][surname][firstinitial] where as some of the admin staff are [firstinitial][surname]. So Mr A Smith is mrsmitha and Dr J Blogs is drblogsj.

Got a few of the XJA140 on order but the date keeps getting pushed back