Achandler

Has vert02 restarted over night? There would probably be messages in Failover Cluster Manager saying if it had or not.

You'll have to clarify exactly what is happening and on which servers, we can called them vrt02 and vrt03. vrt02, you cannot see the virtual servers (except the one you have recently moved?) when logged in through Failover Cluster Manager. vrt02, you can see all servers in Failover Cluster Manager? Those on both vrt02 and vrt03? In Virtual Machine Manager, you can see both all the servers on both vrt02 and vrt03? If that is the case, then if you open HyperV on vrt02 does it show any servers at all? Which method did you use to migrate the server, through Virtual Machine Manager or through Failover Cluster Manager?

Changing the quorum setup? There should be no actual change you will notice (except you will now be running a supported configuration). I have changed mine before, multiple times in fact, for example when 1 host fails I have needed to go to disk and node, then back again once the host is fixed. I never suffered from random restarts though. Are they "clean" restarts you are getting?

Maybe but some schools simply don't have the resources to spend £5k+ on a core switch. And if the choice for a school was a cleaner or a switch, then there is only 1 choice for them.

We have a couple of D-links, we double up on them because they are cheap. Haven't had any problems yet (in about 2 years) but we bought them as a stop gap before we could afford better switches which seems to be getting further and further away at the moment.

If you have 2 hosts, then you need your quorum to be set to node and disk majority otherwise potentially you have a stand off if both servers think they should do different things, the disk would have the deciding vote (in basic terms). That bit is easy to fix, right click the cluster in Failover Cluster Manager then choose more actions then Configure Cluster Quorum Settings. Then change your quorum type. Whether this would cause random reboots, I wouldn't have thought so but it might. Your witness disk being 99.1% free isn't a problem.

does your webserver host any other sites?

I just got given a sum a lot less then 10k to do all maintenance and upgrades with, we have 900 kids on roll and about 400 devices. I reckon including all licensing, Internet feed etc, I will spend about £45k (maximum) this year. So about £45 per student.

Personally I would recommend buying one over ipsca, they see quite slow at making sure all browsers always support them. For example we had an SSL from them that you couldn't use on IE for about 6 months (well ti gave an error) because they missed the deadline to get included in the certificate pack.

A wildcard will be fine then. We use them for our school website.

At the time of the interview the preferred bidder for the IT had already been selected and apparently they had already decided what IT equipment they were going to provide, this was going to be signed off after the appointment of the post and the person appointed was expected to scrutinize the bid etc before signing it off. From the information I got on the day, the preferred bidder had been selected by the government, so probably a civil servant in the Department of Eduction (or whatever it is actually called nowadays),

1) I have been at a job interview for a free school, and the way they were funded was that the government/ council had chosen a preferred bidder for IT hardware and a set budget was given to them. With regards to IT support they were employing someone in house to do the support, so I guess they can really do whatever they want in that respect. I have seen other jobs at free schools advertised as well, normal jobs that you would see at any school. 2) It is illegal to only employ people of a certain faith I believe, but obviously they can easily chose someone of that faith over you were you to apply for a job. Catholic schools for example can't only employ Catholics (or that is my understanding) and most of them have non-Catholics working there. They can expect you to take part in religious ceremonies though, which might make some people uncomfortable. 3) I have no idea.

I read that link earlier (the technet stuff), it also mentions Intel motherboards and problems on them. There is a post from someone mentioned that the Network Service should never need to be in the Administrators Group as well. But at least you have your VMs working now, and can look at other issues later.

So you have read only permissions to the disk. VMs need modify to launch. and obviously can't create. VMM and HyperV are probably fine, the problem will be the resource being locked through Failover Manager, I have had this before when a server failed. You could Try evicting the dead host from the failover cluster, so effectively you have a cluster of none, then bring the disks up one by one and see if you get an error. There is also a command to see permissions to the disks (as in which hosts). if the evicted hsot still has permissions you coudl remove them there to. I have had a similar problem before caused by a dead host, and evicting it sorted my problem, I then had to remove a permission to the cluster resource as my disk was showing as redirected.

So the VMs aren't stored on a SAN? Or do you mean you can see the .vdi files within C:\ClusterStorage etc but cannot start them. If the second problem is the case, then it is likely a permissions issue on the actual virtual machines or on the cluster disk. There is definitely a command you can run to see who has permissions to run a Virtual machine and you can add a server's permissions manually using the GUID (I think I remember). Another way of testing what the problem coudl be is create a new VM on the functioning server, then run it, this will prove the issue is purely with the already created VMs. If you can create new ones fine, you can even test if the problem is with the "hard drive" or the configuration part of the VM by creating a new VM and attaching the .vdi of a dead VM checking if it boots (it probably won't) because it is likely the vdi that is locked. Do this test on a none essiential VM just in case. The problem with a permissiosn issue is you can eb checkign things for hours to find where the problem lies.

I assume you have a failover cluster, since you talk about the witness disks etc. Can you get either host online and actually login to it to open the failover cluster manager? You need a DC to be working to login and open the failover cluster (which I assume you have).

I would get rid of the red bit, there is no need to mention it. I would also be tempted to change the last day date to be 3rd of September, as you haven't handed the notice in at the start of the day. Dear ......, Please accept this letter as a formal resignation to .... School as ICT Technician. As I have not yet received any details in my contract of employment on the required notice periods, I hereby give the legal minimum my required notice of 1 week. My last day of work will therefore be Friday 31st August 2012. ....

If you are an academy then you aren't employed by the LA but directly by the school, and as some policies may well be different. However, I would doubt that they are different at all, most schools I know have pretty much identical policies in place, especially new converted academies, this is predominantly because in house the school doesn't have the expertise to change the contracts and they haven't as of yet seen the need to. Be careful what you write in your letter, don't make it sound like it is there fault you don't know your notice period etc, never burn bridges etc. Thank them for giving you the opportunity (even if you have only been their 2 weeks).

They could indeed offer it to the second best candidate should they chose to. Normal Local Government contracts would have a 1 week notice period for the first 3 months (sometimes longer) so unless your at an academy then that shouldn't be an issue. As for handing in your notice, you should email the appropriate staff and send a letter to the school "signed for", then as long as you don't sign for it and the letter is signed for by someone then that is enough. It isn't an employees fault if they work when HR staff don't. I had a member of staff leave during the holidays once, and this was the advice given to him from the Union.

We have had widescreens for ages, there has been times where 23" widescreens were cheaper then 17" standards... crazy

The preview version fo Windows 7 didn't have a working generic one, well didn't work for my SATA drive.

Sometimes believe it or not, it is asking for the driver for the CD drive (yes i know you already booted off it), this is a problem windows 7 gave me (at home) If it is a SATA CD drive then go into the bios and turn it onto IDE mode.

Your looking at the wrong thing then, Forefront for Exchange is 64bit. Edit: Your want this "Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server" I believe

Well you know the procedure, backup (retaining permissions), replace the 3 drives, make a new bigger drive, copy back data and re-create/ check sharing permissions. Quite easy to do just very time consuming.

Sadly, usually the case is that should you take out 1 disk then try to rebuild the array using a bigger drive, the bigger drive would get truncated down to the same size as your old drive was. This would mean your only choice would be to backup all your data (at least once, probably twice for the most important stuff) and then remove all 3 drives at once, put in bigger drives, copy all the data back and check all the permissions. Use something like Robocopy or Xcopy to maintain the permissions on the data, otherwise you will have an even bigger job to do. I assume you have looked at all the alternatives and this is the only solution? Also 3 new hard drives are probably very expensive, have you priced them?