jamesfed

Can't wait - we haven't had any school closures (besides teachers strike) since I put in the new VPN and can't wait to see how it handles it's self

16 core AMD Opterons....dual socket - 32 REAL cores how easy can it be - with 8:1 that is 256 VMs. To be honest we over subscribe our Hyper-V CPUs and as others have said CPU is rarely the bottleneck in virtualisation, most often its in RAM (where dynamic allocation and just having loads of the stuff comes in use) and in the disk IO (where SSDs come in use).

Yep just keep adding on cameras and adding on the software lics for it as you need. Phew the luxury of space! There is however 47Us of space in another cab in our server room that the LEA is using for comms kit - might have to charge them for it sometime

I'm accualy starting to worry about space in our 42U rack! If I get to order the 2 new servers this April I will be down to just 4Us left! Software for 12 cameras was £800 - the software it's self is fantastic though, I did look at some of the 'free' alternatives but none of them quite hit it on the head as this stuff does for me

First photos of the new server - will post up specs and hopefully a video tomorrow afternoon

I'll always go for a Lenovo if I want something truely robust - with HP as its 1 point below (ProBook B/S series). I wouldn't go for Sony or Samsung - too much gloss and not enough stablity in the cases.

Client OS and Server OS would help here - if its XP as the client and server 2008 R2 as the server OS (or 7/2003) then there are ways to fix that problem...

UKWSD always for me - they call themselves a 'premium' host however they arn't much more expensive than most others. That little bit extra does show in their speed of service and in some of the very nice addons you get (e.g. none of this free Google Adwords rubbish but 2x daily backups which are easy to restore from, cPanel (which is worth its weight in gold) and DNS management). Their support is second to none as well and thats out of all of the IT companys I have ever delt with.

Hell yeah for G1 But yep just eBay HP Server AMD and you will find one dosn't come with the rails though but for that price what would you expect anyway!

I would only ever do it using something like App-V - this way the two applications are totaly isolated from each other preventing the conflicts that will happen reguardless of any other fancy deployment methods.

Bought a old HP DL385 G1 with 2x2 core 2.2 Ghz AMD Opteron, 8 GB of RAM and 6x 36GB 15k SCSI 320 drives for £110 - works a treat with 2k8 R2 on for my testing VM enviroment.

You can indeed - but if you use the cheaper subscriber units they have to be hooked up to a publisher (more expensive) to work.

So long as you don't mention to anyone I linked to RM its ok Yep you will need a publisher to get the main content out - TV card works a treat as you said. If you want to send TV to the subscribers you will need the streaming add on though. The top box would be fine - the other model in the publisher series is just a bit faster by way of its processor. Although we don't have OneLAN at my current place at my last school I was involved in the install and its great - free lifetime software upgrades as well (justifys the high initial cost IMO).

Not that I would suggest you buy from them but it'll give you a idea - OneLan NTB510-SA (Stand Alone) + Essentials Pack

With the link I provided you can do this easy enough - you just create the individual folders en masse and then user isolation does the rest. Its a whoooole lot less work than 90% of the other options out there.

FTP User Isolation is what you want to look at in Microsoft IIS7 - Configuring FTP User Isolation in IIS 7 : FTP 7 for IIS 7 : Publishing Content to Web Sites : The Official Microsoft IIS Site

I'd go for a complete backup and then restore to a newly created RAID array - rebuilding the RAID5 array onto new disks each time would take agggesss and you would have a significant performance hit while it goes on.

Think I've found what I was looking for on the X- Case site Thanks for everyones help! I'll post up some photos when I get to build the thing

By all means

No problemo - Ill post up some details when it gets installed.

1. Our current plan is for our VM Servers to last at least 4-5 years with a mid life upgrade somewhere in the mix. We don't have a SAN - only use local storage (SSD and HDD). 2. We use thin clients and have the intent of those still being useful in 4-6 years time but don't see how using virtual servers would affect the life time of a normal desktop PC.

Milestone Xprotect Express is the software we will be running (on top of Server 2008 R2), cameras are a mix of Sony E Series, AXIS 212 and AXIS M32. Going to be a pretty nifty setup once we get it going

Cheers That link brought me onto - Rackmount 2u hotswap case online at X-Case which looks like it'd support our needs - anyone have any experiance with anything simlar?

Already have done Everything I've found so far is about £100 more than I have to spend.

Petty soon we are going to be deploying a new CCTV system in the school, a small amount of funds have been put aside as part of the project for the server which will be running the recording software. I've seen in the past many a fellow edugeeker has built a custom designed backup server with a tonne of hard drives in and I'm looking to do the same. My only design requirements are- +Must be a server rack case (no pedestals and I have a max of 4U to play with) +Must be able to house at least 4 3.5" drives (more the merrier though) +Compatible with standard mATX (AMD) motherboards +Cost is a factor but I won't be 'cheaping out' if I can help it +Would need to come with rack rails