tmcd35
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Everything posted by tmcd35
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My guess would be there are 4 NIC's connected to the same subnet and one of the other NIC's is receiving the ACK packets for the ping. That's why I asked if the NIC and Switch would support channel bonding.
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The question of which base OS depends on how many physical CPUs (not core count - physical processors) the servers have, and how many VM's total you want to be able to run. 2xWindows Standard per server will net 4 VM's per server, or 8 total. 1xWindows Datacenter per server should cost about the same and net unlimited VM's across both servers.
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*waits very patiently for extended edition UHD six-pack BluRay collection*
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Decided to pay for Sky Movies on my Sky Now subscription (can't find much to watch on Netflix at the moment), and found - A Millions Ways To Die In The West. Absolutely brilliant comedy! Seth McFarlane (Family Guy) is a genius.
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Have you completely removed the old server from the network? It sounds like it hasn't replicated properly. If the old server is still on the domain, still joined to the network, then you need to look for replication errors in your event logs, or just give it time to replicate. If the old server is gone, then you want help from someone more knowledgeable than me. My guess would be to restore System Settings from a recent backup? (but don't quote me on that). Depending on the state of the old server, have you run DCPROMO on it to demote it?, I'd be tempted to revert everything back to the old server, make sure everything is 100% perfect there, and then rebuild the new server from scratch.
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If possible, I'd virtualise if only because it makes future hardware upgrades a lot easier to manage. You can also segregate services off in to their own servers AD, File, Print, WSUS+WDS - so they are less likely to interfere with one another and allow for easier software/os maintenance in the future. Given the RAM, I'd spec a series of VM's on each host to use no more than 14Gb between them - more than enough for that handful of servers. The only other questions revolve around processor cores and hard drive space. You pretty much need quad core on each host, min, for this to be effective.
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What type of server is this? Is it a Domain Controller? Is there any reason for 4 nics? Are they on two totally segregated network domain? If so what's the network address and subnet mask for each domain? Does the nic and switches support LCAP channel bonding (802.11ad - I think)? What's the DNS and Default Gateway settings for each NIC?
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The last time I watch a movie based on a forum recommendation... ...I need some Aspirin! I worked out the major plot twists well ahead of time (let's face it, they are sign posted) - but still, trying to untangle resulting paradox - arrggghhhhh!!!!!! Great film, kudos, thank you.
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That's interesting, I'll look out for it. I've only ever heard of loopback protection in terms of spanning tree. True, but I'm going to segregate a bit more granular that 'students' and 'staff'. It'd only take out the one ICT suite, and would be obviously between the two computers that don't have a working network connection...
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Spanning Tree is good, but not without it's issues. We're going the next logical step - seriously VLAN'ing the network and only live patching ports that have physical devices attached to them. Even without spanning tree (which will off course be enabled anyway) it'd be tough to bring down the entire network with a single loop.
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That's why I scaled back our plans here to offer 10Gb at the core now ready for future edge/server (more likely server) upgrades. I was thinking of 10Gbe to one or two edge locals but realised bonded 1Gbe is a lot cheaper and would give us plenty of bandwidth in the short to medium term.
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I don't know, those prices look extremely reasonable to me. Might be a bit less than the Allied Telesis quotes I've not long green lighted. Certainly a good option for the edge in future upgrades.
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Not sure what you are getting at. Yosemite does traditional (virtual) tape based backups at a file level on the file server and doesn't touch the virtualisation at all. Purely user files and gives us great long term daily backups with simple to use and (being disk based) very fast file recovery. As for Hyper-V backups, we do those manually at the moment and are looking at VEEAM to get rid of down time. The only problem we've had when attaching restored VHD's to new Virtual Machines is their network settings being lost, a quick search around the registry gets the correct NIC details and the VM's are back up and running as if nothing had happened. Yosemite has caused us minor issues when we've rebuilt our file server and assigning old backups to restore on the new server but having used the product in one form or another since its Tapeware 7 days (some 8-9 years now, at least) I'm very familiar with how the program works and am used to the interface.
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Redundancy! We have 3 host servers each capable of running 2/3rds of the total load. If one goes down the other two pick up the load. If two goes down we prioritise what runs on the third. If all three go down, we have bigger problems to worry about than the network being out of action.
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For the type of file level backups it does I've not found anything that can do the job better, can't say I'll be moving away from this any time soon.
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I can't think of a good reason to backup the host server - unless it's running other services, which it really shouldn't. Just do a fresh OS install and (Windows) install the virtualisation role.
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We use BarracudaWare's Yosemite Backup (formally Tapeware - as was given away with HP Tape Drives 'back in the day'): BarracudaWare / Yosemite Technologies - to do disk to disk backups to a virtual tape library held on a NAS in a remote building. We do 1 full and 364 daily incremental backups per year. Currently looking at VEEAM (free) to do live VHD backups once a term to our portable NAS that is taken off-site. We currently shut the VM's down to back up over a weekend.
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That's not all together true. A lot depends on the contention ratio of the uplink, if/how the network is vlan'd, and there's also the possibility of LACP trunking. As I mentioned above, out WiFi upgrade project for the summer has somehow turned into a semi-major switch refresh at the same time. What I've found as I've actually gone round looking at the the switches, is that 10gig is still largely too expensive for the edge, and a combination of good vlan'ing and LACP trunking the uplinks provides more than enough bandwidth to support 1gig to the desktop, especially since the vast majority of users would never use all the bandwidth available to them anyway.
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I did wonder if the Staff:Computer ratio was wrong for EES. Although you do need to add in MDOP, SCCM, Endpoint and Exchange (assuming their using all of them) to be fully equivalent. Endpoint would be something like 10p x 700 devices x 12 months x 5 years = £4,200, for example.
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(guesstimate) It is but I'd be interested in the maths. £35 x 600fte x 3yrs = £63,000. Or 5yrs = £105,000. I'd be interested to know how much the equivalent perpetual licencing costs for 700 machines. Admittedly £21,000 per year for 5 years sounds better than £90,000 upfront (another guesstimate). Of course it's only £63,000 over 3 years, so if you upgrade your OS every 3 years it £30,000 cheaper than the guesstimate. The conundrum of EES.
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Recommend a Suitable NUC PC for ICT suites
tmcd35 replied to genesis's topic in Learning Network Manager
Don't know about NUC's. Only used the Intel ones here for admin and they only have HDMI as far as I can tell. However, we had similar issues here with ICT suites (who doesn't). @VeryPC do a great range of 'Flex' SFF machines with the I/O ports under a screw locked faceplate. Incidences in that suit have dropped away completely - but then the suite is 'owned' by an ICT Teacher who looks after it. In a non-Teacher lead room (free for all, lit.) we put some Stone All-in-One units, again I think VeryPC do a range. Still some minor cable swapping going on but a side from that they've proven to be the best form factor all round, and they look stunning. -
I think we over pay! I just take the total staff count off SIMS.
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I'm going to hope/assume your FTE count is wrong and pick up some of the other bits around EES: You need to decide how often you want to upgrade these. When/if you move to Server 2016, or wait for the next major update. If you think you'll be refreshing you Server OS or SQL licences within 5 years then EES would normally be cheaper. Any longer and Perpetual licences are almost always better - which is why I never buy server licences on EES. Dows that SQL count include licences for SCCM? if so deduct them, SCCM comes with the SQL licence it needs. What features do you want our of SCCM? Are you looking to use it to manage the servers? If not then all the licencing you need to run SCCM are included in the CoreCAL pack under EES. This is an extremely cheap (couple of £ per fte) add-on to the basic Desktop licencing under EES. For about £35 per fte (exact quotes from your favourite reseller), the Core Desktop Licence pack + MDOP should net you: Latest Windows Latest Office Server CALs SCCM CALs Exchange CALs Endpoint AV CALs MDOP (App-v, UE-V) and more for all client computers - a very good deal!
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In performance manager, on the guest, is the memory reporting 100% usage? Windows mearly thinks it's got 4096mb installed. Dynamic Ram will reduce that only if a) the memory is needed by another VM, b) the machine isn't using it all, and c) it's not the minimum allocation limit for that machine. The guest will report full allocated memory as being available so long as those three conditions are not met. Start up a few more demanding VMs with bigger minimum memory requirements and see what happens.
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I've been working with Net-Ctrl on a managed Wi-Fi project. We've needed to do some upgrades to both core and edge switching within the project. They've given us some really good pricing on Allied Telesis kit, which I have to say I'm impressed with - at least on paper. We're going to be using some Stacked x610's for the core and websmart GS950's at the edge. Price for 9 switches (3 core, 6 edge) compares favourably against 1x HP 5400 series core! (by the time we've kitted out what we need in modules, etc)
