jamesfed

Even with a budget of £45k a year we still get many large projects through operating leases - they work out fine just make sure your SBM/Bursar has a good look over the terms and conditions before. Side note really but just to echo the above point about All in Ones – we’ve never found them to be as reliable as normal desktop/monitor PCs. If you are seriously after small form factor though take a look at things like the Zotac Zboxs with AMD Fusion CPUs – I have one with a SSD in and it flys along on everything I throw at it (even with just a 1.6ghz dual core processor). The big bonus comes in they come with a VESA mount and as such can be put on the back of a monitor in a very neat and tidy way. The Novatech nBox is a very simlar example that can do VESA as well (we will be going with these for our next big deployment).

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Are you using Fixed or Dynamicly Expanding disks for your VMs? I have seen this in the past with Dynamic and best solution is to backup everything and convert up to Fixed asap.

As far as I understand Windows 7 Pro is designed for SMBs and home users who want network backup/file sync ect. Enterprise is the one schools should be looking at with things like App Locker (as you found out) and Bitlocker ect... After all under EES its cheap as chips

and how much does this cost? My 6950 was just £200 and I am happy with a single screen (well for now...)

Windows 8 is on the way Personaly I'm waiting.....

It would quickly muck up any DNS requests to the thin clients - to be honest though its so very easy to keep the names the same as their MAC address (or other unique ID) why bother the potential for hassle to occur?

Further to my previous message - how many machines would you be imaging at one time? This can help gauge disk IO requirements and NIC requirements.

Do you have any part numbers? What is the rest of the hardware for the server going to be as well?

We have it running on Server 2008 R2 and it works like a charm – much improved over plain old 2008/2003. Main reason being is 2x SANS are expensive but 2x storage servers are much less so – especially when they in turn host multiple virtual machines. Our entire server strategy has in fact been based around the idea of replicating data using the tools in modern server operating systems and using a rock solid backup system. Even our virtual desktops run without a SAN However…..having said that we are about double in size to your school and have a very high expectation of up time (we run 24hr systems thanks to our remote access) – having things like DFS and replication allow us to take a server offline for windows updates for a hour or so while everyone just goes on using the replicated server – this way we get very little service downtime each year. So for some schools – yes it maybe over kill so long as you have a solid backup/recovery plan and your staff don’t expect things to work 24/7.

Sorry my meaning behind it was more aimed at the idea that its been deployed with no idea of what to do with it in the first place - naturaly the system would evolve into more as time goes on and as uses are found but from the outright there should be a NEED for it. This is after all how buisness cases are formed - you have a NEED for a new type of tech and so you go and deploy it. You don't just deploy things on a whim that one day you will find some uses for it.

No problemo - do stay tuned to this forum as some other Edugeekers will no doubt soon chip in with other ideas.

Ahhhh ok that would be harder then - maybe setup one of these for your internet connection at the main office - DrayTek Products Index They are a step up from your normal router and can do VPNs even without AD setup.

So do you have a server and AD setup at your main office?

You could have the VPN running on each of your machines at the site office - how many are there? In an ideal world you would have a small server (say a HP ML110 or a MicroServer) setup with either Server 2008 R2 BrachCache or if high speed is a real issue then DFS-R. Either way if you deploy TMG 2010 at your main site you could then have at your remote site a normal internet connection without a hardware/software firewall your client PCs each of which hooks into the VPN. Everything would be kept secure as its sent through the SSTP tunnel.

It does on my Windows 7 Home Premium PC

VPN sounds like your best option - PCs at your remote office would use the VPN to tunnel over the internet (use a SSTP VPN if possible) to get right into your servers at the main site. However the speed at which the network connection works would be limited by your internet speed. Things like TMG 2010 and Smoothwall can do VPNs easy enough.

In speaking with suppliers we have about 2 months before HP will be shipping Gen8 to the UK - all of which I would guess are to the big guys leaving us probably at the 3-4 month wait period.

Sign up for Live@Edu (would be something to plan) - its praticly free from Microsoft and would let you use Outlook on your PCs and mobile device sync on the iPad Roll out to the whole school and que applause as you deploy a perfect IT solution......or at least in all of our dreams.

We are always going to be limited to ~15k given the speed of sound and the problems that breaking the speed of sound inside a hard drive. HDD maybe the way for pure capacity but speed is going to have to be in SSD/other tech region. Having said that with even greater data density you could read more data in a smaller amount of space (and so be slightly faster).

Yep having a particular intrest in AMD I did see going to be intresting to see how Fusion/4200/6200 processors go in there.

In that case you might want to setup a SharePoint document library and then when your weekly mail drop comes around SharePoint would blast off a list of the documents that have been most recently updated - the documents would stay on the SharePoint site and never touch the mail boxes.

You should get your LEA/whoever looks after your DNS to point a host recoard (e.g. rds.company.co.uk or rds.schoolname.leaname.sch.uk) at your IP address - make sure your certificates on your server have been setup to accept requests on that DNS name as well. So basicly you shouldn't be using a .local DNS name Following on from what others have said you should look at putting your RDS server behind TMG/UAG for security.

Intel Atom Servers - SM10000-64HD High Density, Low Power Server | SeaMicro Designed for the social world where RAM and low power consumption is more important than CPU cycles. Too right on the AMD chips Here I am with my E-350 with 8GB of RAM inside.

As for all things that has to be a need to use it in the first place further more you should not go about looking for things to use it with after it is deployed but before instead.... SharePoint is great for keeping 'lists' of data and viewing it in a number of ways - ordered document librarys is another of its key features as well. So if you have anything that would fit the bill then by all means however to me it sounds like you have something and are trying to figure out what to do with it after its deployed.