Achandler

We have a room, probablly similar size to yours, we have Lenovo A70z all in ones mounted on the wall, keyboard can be put on top of them and out the way if necessary, so can the mouse. There is desking all round the wall which must be about 12 inches deep maximum and then stools for the students to sit at, similar to those in a science suite.

i stumbled across these by accident to be honest when speaking to a Wifi Solutions company and have used them ever since.

Yes they are PoE, you get inline adapters with the products or you can buy adpaters to work with a PoE switch.

We moved in September 2011, so SQL 2008 R2 support must have come into place in the last update.

Yes, it should be fine. You just need the access points. We have 35 points and an average of 250 devices on it absolutely fine, though I have seen 350 before. Including 80 or so staff iPods.

Having read the site, it implies you runt he server that they connect to.

I was told by a Capita employee, that you have to use SQL 2008 (not 2008 R2) as it isn't officially supported yet but it should be soon. Basically install SQL, note down the server name, admin name and password etc. Install SIMS itself (to allow you to test), then use the DBackup tool to restore the "backup". You should then be able to connect, it really should be that simple. Just make sure you are installing the same version of SIMS as your datbase was when the old server broke.

I moved from Ubuntu to CentOS, as CentOS is meant to be supported on HyperV. It works better then Ubuntu did on HyperV anyway, so i'm sticking for now but I'm not a fan of the Fedora/ Red Hat way of making websites, I changed my .confs to look liek ubuntu and it makes way more sense

I've looked at the Minecraft site and maybe I just don't get it but how is this educational like they claim? I looks like someone making a world out of Duplo (that nis the giant Lego for babys), and has the graphics of a 1992 game. We have kids who play it, I don't really understand what they enjoy about it and when you ask them they don't seem to know. If there was a good reason (probably education based) then I would try and pursuade the school to buy it for an IT suite. So any ideas?

One of the things I woudl lvoe to see, if that you can specify unneeded machines in event of a failure, to allow oversubscribing resources better. I would like to specify that if I lost say 2 hosts or 3 hosts then shutdown all servers except the exchange server, main DC and fileserver for example. As this is the core of what I need to keep people working, they can not print, and have printers mapped locally if that was really necessary while work is completed.

Arthur, although I haven't added a VM with to many processors recently (since SP1) I can say that when I tried to add a dual core VM to a host with 8 threads and already 6 virtual cores in use but loads of RAM free, I was met with the error that there was not enough resources available. I actually took a core from another VM on the host taking it to 5 of 8 used and then the VM could be made. This was an older server but the problem existed. Recently I also had a host fail overnight (my newest and best host) and the next day one server was down, there was plenty of RAM free on other servers but a lack of virtual cores and this server refused to start, infact it actuall moved itself (when starting with the cluster manager) to a server that had spare cores (even with though sufficient RAM was available on the host it was on) once I moved some VMs about. Maybe this is due to System Centre Virtual Machine Manager or maybe these limits are due to Failover Cluster Manager, and not actually the physical hardware limitation I don't know and I haven't looked into it as I have sufficient cores available anyway as long as I don't have VMs all over the place. I work with 3 older hosts and 3 new hosts, so it makes life a little bit trickier. I also before that this core problem is one of the major benefits of the AMD processors with physical 12 cores (no hyperthreading), as you get more cores for your money and as such they make a better host. All my servers are intel based though, so no experience with them.

I dont have any floating characters or light glitches. There are bugs, my god there are alot of bugs but they are usually quest related.

Three lower spec servers would be better in this instance as a number of server possible, but might not be the best choice long term. Im sure dynamic cores will be possible as it would be an underlying software software change to "insert" the cores or maybe they will work using 1 big core where you could allocate a percentage maximum and minimum of it (allowing over 100%). I haven't use VMware but David seems to be hinting it is entirely possible to overallocate already in VMware so I assume if a node fails the allocations get sorted out to keep all VMs working. If this is the case, then the technolgoy must exist.

Yes that is true, one host could support upto 22 VMs with 1 CPU or 11 with 2 CPUs etc. The combination would need to be less then 22 CPUs ofcourse. The dynamic memory allocation for the VMs only came into play in the last Service pack, so maybe dynamic cores numbers will be introduced soon.

Nope 1 thread is a core, so you have 24 virtual cores (12 cores with hyperthreading (2 theads)) in total. So I would allocate upto 22 cores to virtual machines. This leave 1 core/ 2 threads left for the host.

I can tell you right now, if you have to many CPUs handed out or to much RAM for that case, then shoudl 1 host fail then one or more of your VMs won't boot up/ migrate over as it ill say not enough resources available. best bet is allocate like you have 22 CPUs and 30Gb RAM available, then just split your VMs across both hosts to share the load.

Where is your license server running in comaprison to your clients?

Sorry Dos_Box but I to have visited Essa Academy and it does look very impressive on the front of it. However, as soon as you scratch the surface I felt there were some extremely "odd" problems, some of which to me seemed obviously and concerning. The building was new and impressive, seeing teachers with Macbook Airs and iPad2s was impressive, but when I considered they have used them for 8 weeks only at the time, you cannot base anything on them. How many will be dropped/ lost or stolen in the first year? The students had "used" iPods for 3 years, but when questioned came up with very little real uses for them, mainly as a dictionary and to look up things sometimes but they prefered the school oweed iPads for that. The school curriculum was also vastly different to ours, and in fact to most schools I have visited and I felt some of these changes were being put in place because they had spent the money on technology without deciding what to use it for first. Is blogging a lesson? My other concern is they used a wiki to teach/ give the students articled, which worked well to an extent, but they had to use for macbooks or imacs to create aarticles for it, not ipads, they couldnt even edit on ipads. The wiki wasn't published externally due to some dubious reason (they blamed the managed service), the Apple TVs in every room didn't always have a password on and teachers choose them individually which seemed crazy! I was never shown someone learning Maths, English, any other Language or a Humanity, there was no equipment to teach Science with they view videos of experiements or the teacher does them, personally I enjoyed hand on Science. I must also add there budget for a school the same size as mine was about 2.5x as much if not more, I wonder if this should be an ongoing concern as best value for money as there was several projects mentioned that were scrapped after 2 weeks, one being some software that was about £20,000. I could never afford to spend 20k and then write it off. I look forward to your article, as when i visited I went with the Head of ICT and the Head of the school who highlighted other concerns to when they scratched below the surface and I wonder if you spotted them to and agreed with them.

I believe they have actually been around from 2000 but were trading as a different name, Open Hosting. No they didn't go bust or anything they simply changed there name. One reason as isprint has said, especially for us is we actually met them as one of the big data centres is nearby to us, so two people came from there (last minute I may add) to fill a spot in a long meeting that was planned regarding leased lines. They were normal people, not Sales People who i must say were hounded by approximately 6 schools as to why they were cheaper (though we didn't have quotes from them pre-meeting) and everything added up. To us they are a fairly local, and part of a much bigger organisation, they gave reasons for why their prices were cheaper. They could also answer questions about the hardware they would provide, what it was and how it would be configured, no other Sales Person could, which was reassuring. There was no Sales rubbish, it was a simple as this is what you get, for what price, BT promised us 100% uptime, until we said what about a power failure in your exchange and it turned outt hat wasn't covered! iSprint has been to the local datacentre to use and seen the backend as such, and they are very open with it (well i thought so). I can understand your concern, that it may well be to good to be true the price they have given but we have genuinely had an excellent service from them over the last 11 months or so, we moved to them last year in half term. We have had intermittant issues once for about 5 hours back in December, can't complain. As for the extra services they offer, no we only use the Leased Line.

You can get switches that are part PoE but 48ports with 8 PoE I ahvent seen, I have seen 8 of 24 though.

So your deploymeny is keeping the key in place as it is a "copied HDD" as such, yes the serial key is within the registry but that cannot be deployed, well it can but they still all require manual activation. The Sony workaround still involved an administrator logging into every computer and running the software once which seems a little silly to me.

Glennda we recently purchase Sony Vegas as a site license. However we have had no end of problems trying to roll it out across the network. We use WDS to install our machines and every single computer was asking for us to re-enter the product key and then activate online. Apparently Ghosting the hard drives doesn't make this hapen, but we don't do that. How have you rolled it out across the school? I have a half workaround from Sony but I am currently thinkign of purely returning the product.

I've got a Q9550 and on some test it out performs Quad Core i5s (not usually i7s though) but games still arent great for 4 cores. As for GPU they are getting cheaper all the time for the "old" ones, circa 6 months. Get some more RAM though to, 1 x4gb is worse then 2x2GB as it wont be runnign dual channel, so get another matching stick if you can.

I have searched to see if anyone has mentioned with piece of software and it appears not, so either noone is using it yet (likely) or our filtering and firewall rules are horribly strict and stopping it from working (also likely). Basically the new way to get exam results from several exam boards is throuh this software, replacing the older web exchange, you download the software install it, then are required to get access keys from the relevant exam boards put them into the software and that is it. When I have entered the exam board access keys it does an online check of some kind, this fails for me (we use Smoothwall). I have checked the smoothwall logs to check if the the site the software is trying to access is simply blocked, but nothing shows in the http or https logs, so I have nothing to go on from there. So my question is does anyone have this working already? If so did you need to unblock any sites or ports? If noone can offer any help then I will work out what is blocking it myself step by step and then ofcourse tell others of the problems I have had, and what I have done to solve them. Be warned this software is coming to your school by August this year!

I highly suspect that you added the printer in question manually, either via IP or the print share, it then asked you to "install" the printer and you then put in your administrator username and password. So now when you print to the printer it uses the username and password used to install the printer and as such the print job is charged to the wrong place. Im basing my speculation on the fact I have done this before