glennda

Had a demo unit from them - seemed ok but didn't like the interface much - preferred the HP CLI

100mb should be fine for that! I also used to run all the schools phone lines over our leased line which saved about 3k a year!

I've been playing with Maraki Recently and have to say the coverage seems pretty good as well as coping with interferance. In our office block alone there is 12 other AP's and it works pretty much throughout. We where testing yesterday when driving a wirelessly controlled Romo. We are on the second floor and sent it up to the 4th. Out building is a very thick wall old Mill.

You don't have to get borri to do the connections to dist boards - I didn't and saved quite a bit just had them come in to commision (setup the batteries etc). The agent is ok and works well although can't say i have used it with Hyper-V. But you can execute a batch file which can be used to shutdown the vm's (something like shutdown -f -s -t 01 -m \\machinename).

How quickly do you need install? I had them drop mine in a week and a half. If you need a Sparky that has wired one before I can give you the name of the fella I used.

how many client machines do you have? my last place with 900 desktop clients would sit at around 40-50meg all day.

don't buy HP ups's they are awful imho and half of them are apc rebadged. Borri's ups' are good and they will come to site and spec something up to suit you needs and go through all the power requirements.

I read the full PDF - they are not really doing away with SBS just removing exchange from it and including a Office 365 connector and calling it 2012 essentials(i think to many drinks to remember the real name so i made one up) - trying to push SMB's to the cloud which half on my clients wouldnt want to do with the current state of the internet in the UK.

Yeah but its hyper-v :/

Its no legal requirement but you have to ensure it is in good working order - therefore in your BYOD AUP you state that any person bringing an item into school does so and takes the full responsibility should there be a problem - therefore blame the users whos device it is rather than the building in which it happened. Many laptop chargers fail pat tests anyway so a visual inspection is the only option.

If you have the San use it - as you say as long as your VM's are well backed up using Veeam you should be ok. And the thing to say is you didn't give me the funding for the san last year and this year you have increased risk - its up to you what you prefer the increased risk or the additional expense. If they say the Increased risk its there fault if it dies one day. With regards to switching 2 ports should be plenty 4 ports certainly enough. I have a client running 20 servers and around 50 VDi machines with 2 x 1gb iscsi from each host. This thread might be of interest - http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/97877-do-schools-spend-more-money-back-end-ict-than-necessary-4.html#post850748 EDIT: Personally to get the full benefits of Virtualisation you need to use a SAN - otherwise you are loosing out on half of the benefits of Virtualisation.

Yup - i used to use the MSA2012FC with Linux but then Linux doesn't tend to mind what you throw at it! As said above the only reason i'm getting rid of the P2000 is to move to VMware 5.0

TBH the P2000 is a Dot Hill San rebadged. They are not compliant with VMware ESXI 5.0 hence why we no longer use them. As you are going Hyper-V you should be ok!

I created a intranet based around a noticeboard - all was php/mysql driven with only staff being able to submit. was fairly easy to code (essentially a table in an array outputting the results for each line). @Edu-IT used it I think although not sure if he still does. Everybody had the intranet launched on login so they could always view the Noticeboard.

Took me about 4/5 of hours for the initial config to learn it and then there was always the tweaks after and setting up extensions but that can all be done via spreadsheets and bulk import - as i just setup using what i thought would be good and SLT had other ideas! Ongoing maintenance apart from the hardware it runs on - not much - reconfig requirements is only what people want changed We used Yealink T28p's setup VIA TFTP (on its own vlan) so each phone is configured on boot if it needs be. Using SIP outbound the whole system for about 90 handsets was 5k but I had the hardware to run it on (old HP DL120 or DL160 can't remember). the yealink devices had there mac address on the side as a barcode and scanned them to excel spreadsheet and used a mail merge to individual files for the configs for each phone then a script to change *.txt to be *.xml so it renamed them all copied to TFTP server and plugged a phone into vlan it looked at the TFTP server and configured itself. Getting the SIP config right was also a little bit of a pain but that was because we where sending the wrong headers - once we had that sussed it worked a treat. and the good thing about sip is you can get say 10 trunks from different suppliers - should one go down you can still call out from the others.

Yup i setup this for my last place worked a treat.

Problem was before we got there it was Viglen completely in Charge - it was a fully managed service so you can only really blame ermm Viglen - there shoddy hardware desktop wise along with some very badly configured servers and Classlink....... enough said after that word!

Personally Site next to a swimming pool doing not alot. I'm trying to decide where to go this year. This Jan was Bali and the Previous two trips had been to different parts of Thailand. Thailand takes some beating and Bali didn't top it!

Oh no the waterproof cables got wet... or the exchanges flooded

You wouldn't if you saw the mess me and @oxide54 had to clean up from (I essentially watched him 4 years ago but learnt a lot). You wouldn't go near them. Luckily I havn't had to deal with RM directly (apart from get software from them which took 4 weeks to give me a cd) so don't have a direct gripe. The Equallogic one is a client I am currently setting up in London. Its nice SAN to install as it does most of the work for you with its tie in's to VMware (essentially you install the module to Vcenter tell if you want a new datastore it creates a lun and maps it to all hosts for you). It also has a dedicated MPIO config which load balances the nics better. Its connected to 3 x HP DL380 G7's booting from SSD with 100GB ram both Dual 6 core Xeons. Its soon to be running 50 VDI desktops along with around 20 Servers. Sadly they could only afford the 1GB ISCSI model not the 10GBE which would have been nice!! Its replacing an ISCSI MSA2000 but they also have a Dot Hill for backups. I'm quite lucky thats the San of choice my boss recommends to clients. If they cannot afford that we tend to look towards OPEN-E on HP Hardware for ISCSI SANs.

You don't use AD do you? surely you can just right click on the time and set it under internet time? I think its on when joined to a domain this is removed.

Zen use there own infrastructure at the back end I believe. Only resell when they don't have a presence in the local exchange - where my office has a presence in the local exchange. If i do trace out i never touch the BT network.

well BT openreach as they cannot use help that!! but we are a zen partner so tend to use them where available.

I'd rather not!

You do also pay 2 1/2k a month on internet lines