Duke

Updated link here as the TES one expired when they extended the application deadline: Whitley Academy | IT Manager

https://www.tes.com/jobs/vacancy/it-manager-coventry-1100472 Hi folks, I'd like to make you aware of a vacancy for an IT Manager at Whitley Academy in Coventry. The Academy are looking for a talented individual to lead a small IT team and manage the day to day running of the network. Lots of opportunities to get stuck in and work with the Academy and external suppliers to shape the IT strategy. All the details are in the advert linked above. The closing date listed is 13th but will be extended to 20th, however if you are interested then I'd encourage you to apply soon. If you want any specifics then contact the Academy or drop me a DM. Cheers, Chris

I'd agree with John and definitely look at Remote Desktop Gateway. Depending on how many concurrent users you need to support and what software they're running, I'd back it with a couple (or more) of RDS servers. These can be virtual, although for best performance when supporting lots of concurrent users you'll generally want them to be physical. At a minimum you'll need three servers (arguably two but I wouldn't recommend it), which can all be virtual if you don't need massive levels of performance or a huge amount of concurrent users: 1. RDGW - This your RD Gateway server which needs port 443 open to the internet. I'd also make it your RD Connection Broker server and use it as a general RDS management server for mapped start menus/desktops and RDS profiles. 2. RDS-01 - Your first RDS server, with all the software you need installed on it. 3. RDS-02 - Your second RDS server to provide some resiliency, redundancy and failover, configured identically to RDS-01. RDS-01 and -02 form an RDS farm that talks to the Connection Broker and is accessed via a DNS Round Robin name. For licenses you'll need server OS licenses, you may need extra licenses for some software, and the main bit will be RDS CALs (sold per device or per user). That'd give you a nice, small, reliable remote access solution which can be accessed remotely via PC, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS, and can also with a bit more work allow you to publish specific applications (rather than a full desktop) remotely too. If you needed to scale it out to support more intensive software and more users (up to about 100 per server) then I'd recommend making the RDS servers physical and with lots of CPU cores and RAM. Alternatively I'd look at VDI, but it sounds like overkill for what you're describing. Cheers, Chris

If it's just Office apps then with a sensibly specced server you should be reaching the upper end of those numbers. The chances of everyone being logged on at once are probably slim, but you'll know better than me in your environment. If you'll be using the remote access system to support school closures and snow days then bear in mind that this can lead to large numbers of people logging on at the same time. Spec-wise: As much RAM as your can throw at it. 16GB DIMMS are cost effective these days, so look at at least 48GB RAM, and 64GB or 96GB if you can afford it. You'll want dual socket processors with the fastest clock speed and as many cores as you can afford. The latest-gen Intel CPUs are very good value for money. Disk capacity normally isn't too much of an issue, just enough to install your application stack with some breathing room. More important is IO performance, so a pair of 10k or 15k SAS disks in RAID1 or four disks in RAID10 is usually sufficient. I would definitely go physical rather than virtual if you want to scale this to the max number of users possible. Virtual RDS servers are certainly feasible, but in a multi-user environment you don't want the additional overheads (however small) caused by virtualisation. Virtual RDS is fine for smaller deployments, but I'd avoid it in the scenario you're describing.

I'd agree with the previous posts. Yes it's possible up to a point, but for the infrastructure needed I don't think you'd see much in the way of cost savings, and it's unlikely that you'd get better performance than desktop PCs. Take a look at APEX and GRID cards, but they're not cheap.

Depending on what your application stack looks like, you can get 50-70 users on a modern, well-specced RDS Session Host. Obviously if your student applications include anything particularly RAM, CPU, disk or network intensive then this number will go down, but for typical office/productivity apps this number seems reasonable. We've got customers running RDS servers with near 100 concurrent users on them with no problems. Bear in mind that if you go over 32GB RAM (which I'd recommend) then you'll need Enterprise rather than Standard licenses for your RDS servers. Going by your numbers (25 users x 10 servers) I assume you're looking at supporting about 250 users? With correctly specced hosts you could drop this down to 3 or 4 servers rather than 10, which hopefully sounds a bit more reasonable.

That's very awesome, nice work! Nice to see so many Sun boxes in there too, good kit.

Cool, maybe just leave the non-production one running but not in use for a while to make sure it doesn't suffer the same problem. If it does crash too then it definitely points to something bad in the environment.

How much work would building a new VM and transferring data across be? If it's not giving you any indication why it's crashing then it might be the quickest fix. Have you got anything else you can rule in/out? Remove any unneeded virtual hardware from the server, upgrade VMware and VMware tools, build an identical server (from scratch, not cloned) and see if it crashes?

What OS is the server running? The Resource Monitor tool built into Server 2008 is pretty good for checking general health and making sure there aren't any obvious bottlenecks. Perfmon is also a good one as you can check general CPU/RAM usage while also monitoring disk usage, queue lengths, etc. which may be particularly relevant on a SIMS server. You can leave perfmon running then check the results over a period of time too. Saying "is blatantly obvious to him is that our SIMS server is really struggling" means nothing without some context, and Capita are hardly ones to talk about utilising resources well... I'd push back to them and ask exactly what they're claiming the performance issue is. What's the server spec, how big is the SIMS DB and roughly how many users access it?

Woo, nice one! If you've got hot-swap drives then you shouldn't need to shut down in order to remove/add the drives, but better safe than sorry if you're not sure. Glad you got it sorted out.

Hmm, if the replica runs fine then it does suggest it's being caused by interaction with something on the network, weird one though. What does the server do? Seen bad printer drivers and print spoolers and things crash servers in the past.

Shall keep my fingers crossed for you sir.

Nothing else in the logs prior to it crashing? Any scheduled tasks that run around that time? Could you clone the VM, power it up without networking, then see if they both crash or whether just the 'live' on crashes? This might tell you if it's something wrong with the VM itself, or whether it's triggered by interaction with something else on the network.

What hypervisor are you using, and have you got all the guest additions (e.g. VMware Tools) fully installed and up to date. Was this a fresh virtual build or was it a P2V?