tmcd35

What if there's a fire and both servers turn to charcoal? I take temly backups on a portable NAS of all my VHD's and store them off site, just in case...

Tried to get OpenOffice adopted here 4-5 years back (should be some old threads on the subject). Gave up when we bought SIMS which needed Word and Excel. Then EES pricing pretty much put paid to using non-Microsoft for the foreseeable future.

Isn't Hyper-V Replica designed just for this exact scenario? Automatically updating copies of VM images between non clustered hosts to provide HA on host failure?

Eeek, didn't mean to put you off. I'm sure you can get something more than suitable for £150-£200. Even better something half decent secondhand off E-Bay would be better in that price range. More a warning on the brand new sub-£150 models which can cause some problems with Rocksmith. Seriously, It's a lot more fun than Guitar Hero IMHO. I was playing along to The Final Countdown last night - grinning like the cheshire cat!

What, you got something against the way I strum? eh-hum, on topic... The problem with cheap guitars (as I found out with my old Merlin) is intonation. The further down the fretboard you go the more out of tune it gets. It's why I paid out for the PRS Custom SE which has a fixed bridge and is intoned at factory - it's a "mid-range" guitar at around £600. I'm sure you can pick up something suitable for less, but I haven't really looked at the market. This is probably the best place for answers: Electric Guitars | Reviews @ Ultimate-Guitar.Com RockSmith, because of the way it listens on the RealTone cable, is very picky about intonation.

Yes, yes, yes, and er - yes! Mixed in with a bit of Justin Guitar | Free Guitar Lessons and you should pick it up pretty quickly. I don't really want to be a musician as such. Just happy strumming away at home. RockSmith as let me really play some fantastic songs and totally improved my playing and opened up my musical tastes. Seriously the best guitar purchase I've ever made!

I've been playing (more off than on) since I was about 8. Only in the last couple of years have I actually started to "get good" (by which I mean - "I can play barre chords now"). The turnaround started with Rock Band 3 Pro Mode and major kudos to Ubisoft's Rocksmith. Started playing Bass last year - wow, so much fun!!! Guitars.... 3/4 size Encore classical guitar, Marlin by Hohner SG100 (el cheapo Fender Strat rip off), A full size Encore accoustic, A cheap Fender Elctro-Accoustic, Alden Dorchester-12, Inspire Instruments YouRock Guitar, and my two baby's.... and Got some pedals my brother in law gave me but never use them (not even sure what they are), An old Cry Baby, couple of Fender/Squire practice amps and AmpKit/Amplitude/iRig on the iPad. Grow up wanting to be Hank Marvin, then Brian May. Neil Finn's son Liam is insane, and Glen Teelbrook of Squeeze is probably the best guitarist I've seen live (wow, just wow!). Style - what ever RockSmith 2014 and it's DLC throws at me. Not good enough to have my own "style". Favourite track to play lead is probably Thrill Is Gone by B.B.King.

^ That, and we we're suckered into it! What's that, you've made the purchasing decision? Placed your pre-order? Sorted your finances? Great, well guess what - that game you were after has been delayed 6 months - thanks Ubi

I wouldn't allow anyone to RDP onto a DC other than me. Hyper-V and DC cannot be on the same machine if you are using multiple non-aggrigate network cards for hyper-v (multi-homing). That leaves WSUS and IIS. I'd run both in individual VM's using auto expanding hard drives with a suitably large disk size (full 2Tb?). You don't need enough physical hard drive space for the 2Tb Virtual hard drive images, but will need to monitor and manage the actual drive space used by the VM's.

Well a price cut and Sony's high demand: PS4 stock shortages could last until April, Sony suggests - News - Trusted Reviews, may just help MS out.

Or use the Printer Migration Tool: Print Migration Tool

A couple of thoughts (I may be wrong, but can't find detail for 2012R2 on this)... Hyper-V can't use DFS shares to store VM's for live migration - the file system will lock the VM files preventing the handover Hyper-V doesn't do live automatic VM load balancing (or if it does, I can't find the detail). It can do automatic failover using Hyper-V Replica. And you can manually load balance using Live Migration.

Looks like pretty good specs. Doing a quick addup it seems to cover running all VM's on 1 machine if the worst happens, pretty much the point of virtualisation. Personally I'd spec up the RAM and CPU's a little to allow for growth other whys, looks fine. Hard drives, I'd be tempted to have 1 large storage pool and allocate space for each virtual hard drive from there rather than segregating space. In deed, I know others will likely disagree, but I'd have the "Data Array" as an expanding VHDX image attached to the file server rather than passing through a physical array. I'd question using a seperate server for storage and using iSCSI to connect the two hosts to that instead of DFSR, but that woudld cost more... I like to split roles as much as possible, I'd put the DHCP server in it's own VM away from the DC/DNS servers. Personally I think RAID5 is fine how you're planning to use it, espeacially with the DFSR replication going on. For how you're planning to set it up I'd say RAID is a must, regardless of version. It's justification is simple - the server keeps running when a hard drive fails giving you time to fix the problem with minimal/no downtime. If you look at Server2012 Storage Pools then hardware RAID is probably best avoided. Storage Pools and DFSR should give you a lot of flexibility.

Got to say I seriously disagree with this! IMHO, static drives should only be used if a) you can 100% guarrantee the maximum storage requirements, and/or b) performance is of primary concern (SQL servers?). @localzuk is right, expanding VHD's should be managed by monitoring the capacity of the storage pool. In deed, it's what Storage Pools in Server 2012 where designed to cover. I thought hardware decoupling was a key benefit of virtualisation.

I only ever use Dynamic disks. But then I arrange downtime during holidays to do offsite backups of the VHD's. All onsite data backups is done using traditional backup software running inside the VM (Yosemite).

And yet it's interesting to see the number of series that get prematurely cancelled due to poor US ratings (often down to very bad scheduling) only to go and do well in syndicate, international and DVD markets. It'd be interesting to see if the success of Netflix's House of Cards has any impact on this immediate results mentality.

What I never understood is why Hollywood (and whever the TV Co's are based) insist on the constant remakes and "remimagings"? There must be 100's, if not 1000's, of quality original Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels out there that could be adapted. Look at Game of Thrones and Walking Dead for instance.

Nooo..... Firefly is the "Faulty Towers" of Sci-Fi, a bit like the orginal Battlestar Galagtica. They are soo, good and soo memerable because of their short runs. If Firefly had made it past 3 seasons (ok didn't get past 1) it would have quickly turned into another TNG/DS9/SG1 clone. Maybe a short one off mini series would do? As for Heroes - Yeah, wouldn't mind giving a new series a go. I actually enjoyed it the first time round.

We use deeply nested OU's for everything. Makes targeting GPO's much, much simpler... Whole School ...Computers ......Staff ......... ...... Students ......... ...Users ......Staff .........Admin .........Teaching ............ .........Students ............ ............Exams ...Groups ......Security ......E-Mail ...Terminal Servers ...Network ......Network Admin Users ......Network Admin Groups ......Network Admin Workstations ......Servers ...Sort of thing...

My first modem... Aw, the pains of setting up AmiTCP... (the days when everyone got their own static IP address!)

Wasn't there something like only 7 IRQ spaces available? So the fun always come when two or more devices wanted to use the same channel. You had to move stuff around/re-configure so things that worked on the same channel where together and other channels where cleared. I seem to remember it always come down to a juggling act between com ports, modems and soundcards.

The only thought that came to my mind was around the software development side of things and the raft of languages required. This head of IT role sounds like a big enough job without adding software development into the mix, and software development can be a 9-5 role on it's own. Unless I'm misreading, it sounds like two posts being shoehorned into one. If it's just manageing the software developer, which makes more sense, why the need to know or learn a raft of languages? As much as programming experience might help, can't see it's required from a pure management PoV.

Aye, it's got too easy. Bring back jumpers, and IRQ settings, none of this "plug 'n' play" malarkey!

When I got my A600 I wanted to fit a hard drive - 20mb if you please!!! Found out the model I bought had kickstart 2.04 and 2.05 was needed for hard drive support. Got on a train to Upminster to buy new Kickstart chip (they actually had one in stock!!!). Fitted using a butter knife to prize out the old chip from the DIP socket.

It's some Power Rangers thing, isn't it?