jamesfed

Time to dust off the SLAs by the sounds of it!

What is the current total capacity of the drives that is showing up in Windows? (it would give us an idea as to the RAID type) On a HP server (can't say about Dells) and assuming the drives are in RAID5 you would slip in an aditional drive load the HP array configuation utility add that drive to the RAIDs logical drive (disk pool) - the data would replicate over ect over the period of a few hours. After its done you would then go into Windows storage management and expand the size of the disk into the new space.

The Libraries only like UNC paths (e.g. \\serverx\students\jbloggs) you shouldn't be mapping them against network drives

What data are you going to be storing on the drives? I've been going with 2TB SATAs for our CCTV/Media Servers however for the time being its SAS Nearline for all our servers/user data.

Yep mean RBC - one letter extra Our LEA does our internet as well but we host something they call a 'bap' lots of networking and comms kit none of which is to do with the school although if we turn it off plenty of local schools and libraries loose the internet.

Maybe contact your local RMBC and see if they know anything about it?

On PCs that I don't want to sync I just disenable the Microsoft Sync Service - can do this through a GPO as well.

Doesn’t setting it to high performance turn off core parking (quite a useful power saving feature) as well? I’ve got all of our VDI servers set to high performance but our ‘core servers’ all run under balanced. If you have a HP server (and I would imagine others as well) there are plenty of other options in the BIOS as well for turning on the higher performance modes (again we use them for our VDI servers only).

Read only access setup here - again part of the AUP for students that staff may have read access to their work. We've also got it in the staff AUP that IT Staff and SMT may access their documents in the event of a disip issue. We set it up with a 'Pupils Read Access' AD security group - when we add staff to it the NTFS permissions kick into place that allows them access and a security group filtered GPO gets applied that maps a network drive to show them the root of the students folders.

Point to note that the licensing does apply for other VM OSes but all the same Id go with Hyper-V Think we paid about £60 for each datacentre lic.

While I sit back in my easy chair with Lync 2010 UC deployed, Live@Edu for students, onsite exchange 2010 for staff, a TMG 2010 powered VPN for staff, UAG portal with HAP+ and RDS gateway not to mention Citrix VDI-in-a-Box and App-V........caus I'm such a un radical person *halo*

HP and AMD everytime None of this Intel rubbish with us!

Not to get into a constant to and fro but as I see it at the moment there are a few kind of educational IT guys out there- • RM CC3/4/whatever guys who let RM do all the work • RM CC3/4/whatever guys who want to get free and go vanilla • Windows Server guys who know Microsoft stuff inside and out and like a unified look and feel of their management tools and has no interest/time/bother in exploring other options because what they use works great • Linux guys who know Linux inside and out who think that everyone else should use it even if they have no experience/inclination to learn it Guess which one I fit in as………………

Backup is easy enough as well if you use System Centre Data Protection manager (does local/and tape backup) which again is dirt cheap.

Take a serious look at Hyper-V and don't just go to your LEA for Server 2k8R2 lics. Hyper-V has 'near' live migration (drop in network connection but only for a fraction of a second), dynamic memory allocation and as we have all said is dirt cheap compared to VMWare (especially on small scale networks where you dont need 100s of GB of RAM). Server 8 is also on the way with memory de duplication (one of the strongest features of VMWare at the moment) which if you get software assurance you will have the ability to upgrade to the moment it comes out. Keep in mind that the enterprise lic will let you run 4 Server 2008 R2 VMs on the same hardware without any additional licensing and that the datacentre lic will let you run an unlimited number of VMs.

All to often I have seen school plays done on piddley little cameras which have a tiny lense - this means that in the low light conditions of a play (and belive me they all are) the picture is very graney. Personaly I wouldn't want to ever pay money to have a copy of a DVD with video qulity like that so if you do ever expect to get people to pay for the DVDs do try and up your budget somewhat and get a propper camera - that or see if there is somone in the local area you can rent one from.

Ricoh all the way - tiny device drivers (compared to our ones for Kyocera) and very very smooth intergration with our Windows 7 PCs.

To be honist the iPad is a consumer device that was never designed to be used in such a manner - wait for Windows 8 tablets to come out, with normal connectors and even the ablity to run any networked projector software that you might have

If you use something like TMG to act as your edge firewall it would log the IP addy of the endpoint device + the time and you could then use that to lookup the IP where it came from. However for all intensive purposes I don't think what you are asking is possible but then again if you have the user and can prove it was then why does it matter about the device?

Trackball is the way to go - I try to use my Wacom tablet as much as possible to.

LED Projectors (like the casio ones) are AMAZING! Praticly instant on/off with little or no noise. Price is high but they work great

Becta? Who are they? *feeel the sarcasm*

We use App-V which dynamicly creates shortcuts depending on the user that is logged in - this way there is no shortcut redirection required. Its a scenic way to go about solving a little problem but there are so many advantages to App-V you may wish to take a look at it sometime.

I'd be interested to hear peoples ideas about this as well - we are looking at a similar situation with but with 3x CCTV displays in the reception, site office and SBMs office.

Although many are mocking it at the moment wait for Windows 8 and put photoshop/your choice of REAL art package on them