jamesfed

Phew that is quite an undertaking! How many techs do you have helping?

RE Sohpos ect I meant it as put them in applications (to install) as part of the MDT task sequence.

Oh and update the media image after you have made the changes and re import the WIM file into WDS.

I assume you have built a 'Media Image' and that by saying Windows PE you mean light touch deployment (which uses Windows PE) then will go from there 1. In Rules add the following beneth [Default] TimeZoneName=GMT Standard Time TimeZone=085 UserLocale=en-GB UILanguage=en-GB SkipLocaleSelection=Yes That should scrub out it asking about regional settings 2. In media rules you can set it to domain join automaticly if you want using these settings (again below default) SkipDomainMembership=YES JoinDomain=yourdomainnamehereinfqdn DomainAdmin=Administrator DomainAdminDomain=yourdomainnamehereinfqdn DomainAdminPassword=yourdomainadminpassword 3. Let it login - that is part of the setup and at that stage will install any applications 4. You can do if you want to, we add things like AV (Sophos) and Outlook in as applications and leave the rest to App-V. Enjoy!

Phew all I did is install SkyDrive on my girlfriends notebook and shes been doing great with it. Not a single script in sight

If it is then its the same on 5 different projectors for us

Under features it says- Flash redirection in VMware View and Microsoft® Remote Desktop Services (RDS) environments using RDP6 Server 2008 R2 uses RDP7 - so maybe you need a different version?

Nothing thats the thing - are going to be looking at warranty replace over the summer holiday though. Will update the thread if we hear anything solid on it, crazy thing is the projectors are less than a year old.

Is it a NEC by chance?

A 28Mb client on the PC and a Management Server that is little more than a file server is complicated? Yes there are some things to think about when it comes to dependancies however its never been anything that a quick Google and well thought out planning hasn't been able to fix.

Take a look at App-V - every item of software on every PC, everywhere in the school The applications are 'streamed' down to the PCs at run time (and localy cached) - this way your image is little more than Windows, IE plugins and the App-V client.

We recently got lucky with our disk based backup server (the case, PSU and HDDs were donated to us by a local company) - have upgraded the innards with SAS/SCSI cards that we had spare and spent about £280 on largely desktop PC parts (mobo/CPU/SSD to boot off of/RAM) - the rather interesting hybrid of Enterprise SATA, LSI RAID5 and desktop mobo has worked a treat for us. Did the maths and figured out that had we of bought it all new this 6.6TB (after RAID5) backup system would've cost us £1,400. Quite interestingly enough a similar setup from RM was in the £3,300 region (not that we would ever buy off them I do enjoy pointing and laughing at their prices).

To System Centre!!!

If only it were a month earlier I could have Windows Server 2012 ready for use this summer holiday Oh well will have to wait for the next term break - Hyper-V 3.0 here I come.

It certainly works a treat - the case we are using has a 9th 2.5" bay inside the case which can be used to separate the OS from the drives you are using to run the backups which certainly helps keep things running smooth when the IO heats up!

Sorry I didn't mean to cause any offense - just that on occasion I have heard of 'unwilling' RBCs who have needed a decent nudge - not to say that this is the rule but the exception instead.

Just as a pointer because people have asked before if you ever have any issues moving your DNS host Nominet can forcefully change the tags Although it maybe registered with your RBC it is your domain name to do with as you wish as well.

Local on the server running off the SSD.

+1 for that - our DPM server chews through 6GB+ of RAM while running a backup (mainly SQL server usage) - CPU utilisation isn't too high on a quad core AMD A6 though. Either way the disk IO is the real heavy hitter - I have seen response times go into the 1,800ms region before which is one of the reasons why I have the OS on a separate SSD.

Just for fun I did the maths and if we were to do a brand new build of our backup server right now it would cost around £1,400 for the hardware - pretty nice for 6.6TB of RAID5 storage. Naturally would be more with bigger 2TB drives but it gives you a number at least.

Just thought I would add my 2p about 2 node clusters.... Although we don't have a SAN (and so no clusters) we do only have 2 virtual host servers using local storage. We've opted to go with a solution I would call 'acceptable losses' where each host has VMs that run critical services using the clustering features built right into the software (nothing at the Hypervisor layer). That way we could lose a virtual host and keep the ‘core systems’ up and running while useful but non-essential services are kept under backup ready to be restored onto new hardware/spare resources on the running server. Right now I consider essential to be- • AD/DHCP/DNS (Uses built in clustering) • File Access (DFS-R) • Firewall/VPN/Internet Access (Built in clustering in TMG 2010) • Lync 2010 PBX (Built in clustering) Email and VLE is hosted ‘in da Cloud’ and I would be ok with loosing Printing, Intranet, WDS, WSUS and a few other minor things for the sake of a £££s spend.

A while back some fellow edugeekers introduced me to a company called xcase (Pc cases and computer cases online at X-Case.) who do rack server chassis which could help with your file server (save going with HP/Dell kit if you are happy with a custom build). We only went for a 6 HDD bay model but they have plenty of options As far as a backup server goes we are just in the same situation as you a few months ago but came across some luck when a local company donated a old file server to us (8x1TB HDDs in a SAS compatible Chenbro case). Cost us about £280 to get a new Mobo/RAM/SSD to boot from/CPU for it and we used some old LSI cards we had spare for RAID. No clue how much it would cost to do one from scratch but I know it would be cheap doing a custom. Made a blog post about it here - Time for a new backup server | my world of IT

It creates the partitions/makes the stick bootable as part of the intial setup process.

Of late I've been running the Windows Defender Offline, deleting out the files on the stick and replacing them with a copy of Windows PE/ImageX. Linky is - What is Windows Defender Offline?

Have had it working in Virtual Box here - although IMO its a right pain and is best run on native hardware.