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We have our 5 virtualised (VMWARE) admin servers running on our two X4140’s and 7110 now and all seems to be well – so far after 2 weeks live anyhow. SIMS runs really well virtualised – I was a bit worried about that initially. The benefits of snapshots have already helped us roll back a mistake on the RIS server in a matter of minutes! Also separating out the services has really helped being able to reboot a server and not lose every network service. The sun kit is great (this is the first time I’ve used it) – the service processor is excellent for remote management - The analytics on the 7110 are superb too, Thanks to Andy from cutter for his help with the sun kit. This has been a really useful thread – thanks for the help and info received.

I would try reinstalling the cards and getting them to show back in control panel - it is obviously a problem. It might not be causing this problem but it will need sorting anyway and its a good place to start. Device Manager -> Right Click on your network cards and uninstall -> once they have uninstalled on your server name at the top of device manager right click and select "scan for new hardware". This will find your cards and reinstall the drivers. Once it has done this see if they appear in the control panel list. If not get the latest drivers and install them see if they appear then.

Kmount is right you have no default gateway – assuming your DC is your DNS server and all your clients are setup to reference your DC for DNS requests then recursion is probably not working. This would probably go unnoticed if you are using a proxy server for your internet – and like he said would not cause this problem but its something to look at in the future. I would go into device manager and remove the network cards and then scan for new hardware, let them reinstall – see if you get them back in the network connections control panel after that Remember your TCP / IP setting though as you will have to enter these again. You have the setting on this page anyhow to referback to.

I have finally sorted this out after trying the usernames in every format / combination known to man. Apparently with Symantec 11D, if you are trying to backup remote storage and it has NDMP enabled you will have these problems. As you know, the NDMP option is a £700+ add-on for BE. So simply disabling NDMP on the 7110 fixed the problem straight away.

Will do - i haven’t explicitly allowed a user - just an AD group to which the BE user belongs. I'll have a play about with it. Cheers.

I cant even get it to connect when i add it as a favourite system / user defined choice. It has an authentication problem with the system. CIFS is all up and running on the same system i can use a UNC path \\adminsan01\shared and it authenticates and lets me in fine.

Just wondering if anyone got anywhere with this. Just installed BE11d and had similar issues trying to connect to the 7110. Cheers.

Are there any set guidelines for the length of time we should be retaining logs for web requests? Also how long do we have to retain archived emails for? How long should we be keeping hold of student user areas after they have left?

This is a GPO setting called "Force Clasic Start Menu" - Under "Administrative Templates" and then "start menu and taskbar"

Are you not using a separate switch for your NFS/iSCSI traffic to the SAN? If they were on the same switch I would of thought using VLANs would be best if only for security. Also if they are on separate VLANs they are in different broadcast domains so you don’t get all the chatter from your other network.

This happened to me: - To reset the username and password, you will need to open a file called "backup_config.xml" (in Notepad) found on the following path on the server: \Harcourt Education\Elf_Solution\bin About 10 lines down there is an XML tag called . Step 1: Copy and paste the contents between the opening and closing tags into the username field of the HMC console. The line beneath this in the "backup_config.xml" file has a tag called . Step 2: Copy the GUID including the parenthesis into the password field of the HMC. These two steps will log you into the console, from there you can reset the Admin password. NOTE: The GUID in the tag is contained in the SQL Server Instance (MSSQL$HMC) and is created by a trigger during install.

I’ve managed to get our 7110 and 2 SunFire x4140’s up and running today with VMWARE ESXi 4 - it was pretty painless (with a few expletives – but i blame the heat). I’ve been happy as Larry moving VMs about from one ESX host to the other and messing about with snapshots – all good stuff! Has anyone used a snapshot to restore a SIMS server after a botched upgrade say? I suppose it would be a bit dodgy with SQL would it not – and it’s not like SIMS upgrades often go wrong sev9756: I had a problem at first joining the 7110 to our domain and i think what solved it was using the FQDN of our DC.

I set our 7110 up yesterday and got the same problem as a couple here - setting up the Double Parity RAID, it just hung there. Tried to do a graceful shutdown but it just got stuck on stopping a process, so i eventually had to power it off. I powered it back on and it had set the drives up and it seemed to be working fine. I also experienced a couple of hangs with the web interface. I have updated it to the 2009 release now though and haven’t had any hangs as of yet. I set our 7110 up via the Service Processor - i got the 7110 out the box, put it in the rack and connected our KVM switch however using the KVM i got no console. Basically what happens is I power on the device you get the BIOS screens etc then grub loader starts but it then just displays a flashing cursor on the screen. Using the SP it all works fine you get the grub loader screen where you can choose the OS version etc then start the console. Is this by design? Is everyone elses like this or just ours? Cheers, Steve

Sims learning gateway is basically SharePoint configured with the SIMS webparts. We have a Share Point VLE and will be looking to purchase the SIMS Web Parts soon. We have one frontend SP2007 server that will have the SIMS Webparts and one SQL 2005 backend database to store all that SharePoint 2007 data. The SIMS APP is on one server and the SIMS database is on another – although we are looking at virtualising SIMS in the next few weeks. To run a Sharepoint 2007 server, SQL Server and SIMS on the one machine would be a lot of services on the one server. Capita do a hosted service which might be a better option.

Its on its own SAN network - see V2 of our SAN diagram attached. Like you, once i get the servers and SAN i'll test NFS / iSCSI although it looks as though NFS is the better option. Cheers, Steve.

This is exactly how i was planning on backing up our CIFS shares on our 7110 when it comes. I just assumed you would be ok to do so - im sure i have done it in the past, i'm sure i just added the shares in as user defined locations and away it went. I decided to minge on buying the NDMP option for backup exec because its so expensive for what it does.

All this is very interesting stuff - we are just waiting for our shiny new x4140's and 7110 to be delivered. We are using the two X4140's & 7110 with VMWARE to virtualise the SIMS server, print server one DC / DNS, a DHCP server, RIS / DEPLOY / Anti-virus server - Aprox 6 servers in total once its all set up. On advice we will probably keep a the root DC physical. We will be using CIFS shares so users can directly access them via the network We'll have a private network for SAN traffic. We will be using NFS instead of iSCSI for our VMWARE images. We will present drives with iSCSI to the SIMS server for the SIMS DB etc Teaming - we will trunk two of the ports on the 2 servers to the SAN switch then trunk together 3 of the links on the 7110. The one remaining link will go into our core switch (for the CIFS shares) as will one or two links (teamed) from the servers. We are using a 1U LTO4 tape drive with BE11d without the NDMP agent for now. We will backup the CIFS shares to tape along with the SIMS DB (using the BE agent). Not too sure what software to use to backup the VMWARE images i will need to trial some software but they will be going to disk then either archived to tape or removable storage - not too sure on this yet. Those are the rough plans for now anyway and will probably change.

We use all 3com gear throughout the school and recently replaced all our existing 3COM network infrastructure with new 3COM switches. We used the 5500G with fibre expansion module which the cabs and servers connect in to, we have about 500 workstations connected with 12 servers and it alll works great. I was mainly used to Cisco gear before which was really high quality gear but you pay for it too. If we were planning on replacing the whole network with 1GB Cisco switches i would of had to mortgage my granny. I have used HP switches too and had a good experience with them and i would put 3COM easily on par with HP. They are very easy to setup an automatically stack making a cab very easy to manage with a really good web interface. Cheers, Steve.

You could always use group policy to push out a restricted group for the students and set the appropriate permissions on that directory for all your machines.

Hi, I have just created a fist draft of our proposed solution with the 7110, and 2 x X4140s and knocked it up in Visio. The set up is splitting the 7110 into two using a LUN for our ESXi VMWARE images and a CIFS share for storage. There is a private network for the SAN / iSCSI bit I have left quite a few labels off and also the networking of the management interfaces. I have attached it as an image – any feedback would be appreciated. thanks, Steve.

Thanks for that, I have had the simulator playing with it and it definitely does help. I am going to draw up a diagram of our proposed whole setup and hopefully people could have a look and see if there are any problems with it or amendments to improve it. One thing I need clearing up is the amount of storage you get left with on the 7110 (2TB) - am I right in thinking: - Start with 146GB x 14 Drives = 2044GB Two of the drives are mirrored as the system disks: - 2 x 146 = 292GB loss Then if you go with RAID5 Double parity: - ~ 2 x 146GB = 292GB loss Then you have one drive as a spare So 146GB loss So you will have about 1.3TB worth of usable storage to then split up Is that right? Cheers

Hi Torledo, D’oh thats given me another alternative now. So Two LUNs – one for VMWARE images on a VMFS formatted FS, the second LUN used to act as a NAS for the actual network. Team two of the 7110’s NICs to the private SAN (VMWARE) network and team the other two to the actual network – is that what you are saying? I can see how that would improve performance with users able to access shares directly instead of using a bridge head server. Cheers, Ste

Hi Cookie Monster, Good to know someone else is in the same boat – I’ll let you know when i get the kit – there is so many decisions – iSCSI, Fibre, NFS, How many LUNS, What switch to use, what Hypervisor to use etc . . It would be good to know what you go with too or any findings you have. I was going to go for a tape library from SUN but the Finance guy here is very protective over getting the SIMS data home with him. We have a tape library for the Curriculum network and i hate messing about getting the tapes out on a Friday. The admin network backups are only up to ~127GB on the current tapes so i am just going for a single rack mount LTO4 HP tape drive – its 800GB worth so we should be good for its lifetime. I have also got quotes for a cheap HP server with storage so i can do some D2D backups – gives us some more flexibility. Cheers, Steve

Hi Teejay I’m trying to visualise this here – probably make more sense when I get the hardware and test it. Are you saying allow users to directly access the SAN from the network? I was planning on putting the SAN on its own private network so i would have to use a VM as a File server to present the storage (on the SAN) to the users wouldn’t I? Cheers Ste

We are in the process of purchasing a 7110 and two x4140’s from cutter to replace our admin servers using ESXi. We were planning to use iSCSI but after talking to Andy from Cutter we will test NFS and compare with iSCSI. Also going to test fully virtualising SIMS - see how that runs. I am still undecided on the setup of the LUNs on the SAN though. I don’t know if to allocate the whole lot to one LUN and let ESXi use the whole lot for storing the images on VMFS, then use one of the VMs to present storage to the admin clients The other option we’re thinking is to have a LUN for the VM images and create a storage LUN and use the iSCSI software initiator within Windows Server to connect to that storage. Also we could create a LUN per Server but we are not planning on running too many VMs so I don’t think we need to do that. Just wondering what the rest of you are planning to do with regard to the LUNs on the 7110 series - Had a play with the simulator though that is really useful. We’re still undecided on a few other things too - like the SAN switches to use and i’m in the middle of writing a new disaster recovery plan for this new setup so I’m a bit undecided on the numerous ways of protecting this setup. We already have Symantec Backup exec 11d with the various agents so we are going to buy a cheap server with quite a bit of storage and attach a rack-mount LTO4 tape drive and do some Disk to Disk backups for static, non essential items and Backup to Tape important stuff like SIM DB, shared drives and User data then that can go off-site every night. The data on the disks will be backed up to removable storage every term and taken off site. We are also planning to backing up the VM images to disk for fast recovery of servers. I would be interested to know how everyone else was planning on going about it.