Butuz

Good luck with that one steve. Put a couple of 2kw heaters in there and leave on for a few days then take the project manager in and lock him for an hour. Butuz

That's because:

Interesting thread!!! We've had to have air con in there as the building was never designed to be able to keep our server room cool (it was not a server room when it was built, it was a cloakroom!!!). Heat exchanger is probably going to be just as expensive to run / environmentally unfriendly as room air con. Modern air con's are very efficient, my mitsubishi server room air con only uses 700watt at full pelt which is amazing really (in contrast a cheap £200 portable air con unit uses 1400 watts) plus as a brucie bonus it can if you need it actuall become a heater, and it's even more efficient at heating than it is at cooling!! Realistically the only way you are going to be able to get away without air con is either if the room/building is specifically designed to move large amounts of air through it, or if you use water cooling of some kind to recycle heat to other areas of the building. This is hideously expensive, it is however A*++ in green terms. Butuz

Wow - so there's a secondary on there with only 750 pupils and 22 non virtualised physical servers!!!! And I thought my electricity bill was nasty!!! Eek!!! Butuz

They've taken this page down now anyway. Butuz

Shaun - does Backup Exec Virtual infastructure Agent allow you to back up VM's off Standalone ESXi boxes - i.e free version, no Vcenter/Vsphere licence. Cheers Butuz

Sounds to me like Application Virtualisation. App virtualisation + Autocad + 500 users = mega money. Butuz

Isn't that the way your supposed to drive in the sun??? Air con in the car is effectively free anyway it only saps of a maximum of about 1% of your engine's BHP or to put it a different way bleeds off about the same amount of power as if you had a curry the night before and had not yet .. errr... expelled it Butuz

Also worth looking at Serif Drawplus - DT / ICT dept love it here. Butuz

That sounds like a really good way of doing it AngryTechnician!!!! Any chance you could take a screenie of your new OU layout in AD U & C's? Cheers Butuz

It's just me that drinks lava then?? :/ Butuz

I only drink hot drinks in my room or someone elses. It's one of those things that no one thinks about but if you ended up giving a kid third degree burns on their face because you tripped or whatever you'd be in p45'ville before you know it. Butuz

Yeh it's a deal breaker for me - reading the odd book would be nice, but if it could also take notes etc throughout the day and possibly ideally use a calendar it would be awesomeness!! Cheers Butuz

Bah well the third box is poo (just using it to host a couple of V workstations), and my two sans cost much less than your one san Alright for some tut tut! Butuz

Can you use the kindle as a kind of virtual notepad and possibly calendar?? If so then I think I may have to get myself one!! Butuz

Don't forget you can use the Free version of ESXi - it works a treat for £0. Of course you don't get the load balancing, automatic failover, advanced backup and are limited to 2 physical CPU's and 256gb ram per box but frankly 90% of schools can make do with that IMHO. Using it here with 3 x ESXi hosts and 2 x SANS and very pleased. Don't get me wrong in an ideal world I would like to upgrade the ESXi to Advanced but that is something we can purchase later as and when funds become available. You can easily virtualise your entire network and have an excellent performing and highly avilable network using the free version. Butuz

Well it is a UK winner of £113 million!!! IT COULD HAVE BEEN YOU JOE!!!! Joe you could have been feeding me and jinnantonnix expensive champagne on your new yacht off monaco right now!!! Damn you!!! Butuz

Well assuming it takes you half an hour to install it that makes your charge effectively £250 per hour? Do you think that's about right? Butuz

What RAID level are you using on the storage for your SIMS server VM? I found Raid 5 / 6 slow on the SIMS server VM as these raid levels give a high write speed penalty. I've been experimenting and have now moved to Raid 10 and the whole server is mutch faster. Am now moving to Tripple Mirrored Raid 10 for ultimate speed: http://www.necam.com/Storage/images/TripleMirror.gif "RAID-Triple Mirror by high-speed RAID engine is adopted. This technology has high speed of RAID-1 and high reliability of RAID-6 at the same time. The business can continue even when double failure occurs to the HDDs of the same RAID. This technology is useful especially for Database and OLTP which require high performance and availability." I'll let you guys know how it goes! Butuz

If you want a very budget yet well designed case capable of handling a pimp setup with multiple big GPUs take a look at the Coolermaster Elite 370. Its cheap as chips and asoundingly well designed and all for £30 + vat. You could use a 3.5 or 5.25 all in one card reader and have room for a DVDRW drive. http://www.coolermaster.com/upload/product/6656/featured/top1.jpg?751100106 http://www.coolermaster.com/upload/product/6656/featured/top6.jpg?1235415780 Butuz

Lol - I know exactly what you mean!!! I organise My Docs badly and just use the search feature. Check out one of my folders I use when I can't see my desktop background any more *sigh* Butuz

Has anyone here implemented or had Partnership Exchange implemented by their LEA in order to service collegiums of schools and also colleges? Had this one dropped through my letter box this morning and just wish to glean some info from anyone who has been through it? I’ve searched the MIS forum and there is not much info available (other than the fact it’s darned expensive). I've downloaded the PA documents from SupportNet for some bed time reading Cheers! Butuz

Don't forget to highlight that you can offset the money you need to expend now on your vanilla system against the money you will be saving by not having to pay for RM support or Server or Workstation licences in the future, as well as a comparison with how much it would cost to upgrade to CC4 as that would be the logical upgrade path for a CC3 school. CC3 (and MS XP / 2003) support ceases in 2014 so you would have to upgrade to something else then anyway. Butuz

Cheers GrumbleDook. I would be interested to hear some constructive ideas from Spannerman2 regarding his "new model" of curriculum network. Personally I think virtual machines / virtual images of some kind would be one of the better ways to provide pupils with an unrestricted desktop / unrestricted network for them to experiment with without endangering the curriculum network. There is simply no way that kind of "abuse" could be allowed on a curriculum network because within 6 months the entire network would either be at best dead or very dysfunctional, and it worst totally compromised and the school would be straight in the newspapers when private pupil/staff data was uploaded all over the internet. I would be willing to wager Spannerman2 would probably be the first to complain to his network manager when he was unable to teach due to not even being able to log on. Another question – assuming Spannerman2 teaches in a school, has he been to his SMT/Head to put forward his radical new ideas on how to teach ICT? How did that go? Cheers Butuz

Depends on the exact apps. If your runnning SIMS etc that can eat lots of RAM and CPU. Either way for 250 - 300 concurrent connections you'll be looking at at the very least three dual processor servers each with 16+gb of RAM. I'd suggest having seperate servers for pupils and staff in order to keep staff apps seperate. Ill be watching this post as this is something I would like to set up at some stage in the future (just for staff). Let us know how you get on. Butuz