Butuz

The fact you lot actually wasted an hour of your time watching that banal rubbish program worries me Butuz

I think it is a good thing - generally your servers spend well over half their life not doing idle, thus energy efficiency is more and more important factor to consider when buying. I would expect most 5500 Xeon based servers to meet the standard ad the 5500 is a step above the 5400 in terms of energy efficiency when idle. Also Many Opteron models should meet the standard already. Butuz

I guess that's a no then! Butuz

Has anyone got this working on ESXi then? or do you have to use Server/Player. I just tried to get on ESCi and it is not working properly - keeps saying the attempted operation cannot be performed in the current state (powered off). Butuz

Awaiting my matching grant to be approved Butuz

wtf! lol! Welcome to Wales! butuz

I think it's actually on the Xen installation CD as one of the options! Butuz

I just signed up for an account Butuz

Anyone using SCL PCs in IT suites? Are you happy with them? Prices seem favourable compared to our LEA Dells. Though it doesn't say on the website if they come with an O/S or not? Cheers Butuz

Wheres the link then Butuz

Though as Kim says - you could probably get on the masterclass course as it is - just dont let your account manager say no! Butuz

To be honest with you - I think you should study the CC3 manual inside out over the next couple of weeks then go to one of the RM technical seminars near you and take the RM certified techncian exam (this is free providing your school has a valid support contract) - if you pass this will be good enouh for RM to put you on the masterclass essentials course - which is alot more suitable for you as it deals more in the nitty gritty of how RM CC3 uses AD and its own software to accomplish its goals. Your right about not bothering with the CC3 For technicians course - it is perfect for someonw ith little or no experience of networks / cc3 but for you it will be a yawn fest and waste of money. Butuz

Shocking What exactly does it take to get poorly maintained schools refurbished - pupil deaths?!!!!! Where is the angry smilie Butuz

Yep - if you lost two hard disks in the same Raid 5 array - say bye bye data. Butuz

yes all my member servers would go down.... I have made SMT aware that a single 7110 would be a single point of failure and given a cost option for dual mirrored. At the end of the day it's up to them - they hold the purse strings, they decide how valuable uptime / data protection is. Should have a decision tomorrow. At the worst, I'll be sure to regularly take copies of the VM images onto another box, will also be doing normal backup exec 11 backups of the VMs for now. Ultimately I would put a wager on the 7110 being more reliable when set up with raid 6 than any of my current local storage. Our biggest and most likely single point of failure currently is actually the air con. If that goes down the server room will gain approx 20 degrees within an hour - and all servers will shut down to protect themselves = whole network down. Butuz

You won't save money replacing a laser with an inkjet. Especially not a cannon inkjet. I've replaced all our individual cannon inkjet's we had with shared HP 3600s Butuz

I take it you two are sharing a room/bed at the conference? Hotel virtualisation???? Butuz

Ah I can see where your problem is now - you've already invested heavily in server infrastructure so it becomes more difficult for you to present your case. My situation is the same as yours nearly - 10 servers all doing separate things (inc 3 terminal servers). Where I have extra leverage is because 5 of the servers are older than the internet itself - out of warranty (thus are costing us ££ per year to warrant), and under perform. In my case - 10 servers virtualised down to 4 physical servers (2 new, 2 existing) with a 7110 san is going to provide big increases in performance, reliability, redundancy - and big reductions in yearly warranty costs and electricity. It'sa win win. there is no reason why not to (apart from initial cost, speculate to accumulate). From what I can see - benefits to you in virtualisation are going to come more from reliability, redundancy, increased uptime, etc rather than performance. I think you also have room to consolidate and get rid of some of the older non quad core servers, thus saving some electricity and support costs. You have to present the benefits to SMT - fault tolerance is the main one, currently if a physical server goes down, all services on it are down until it can be repaired (few hours, through to over a week) - is this acceptable? To us it was not. With virtualisation, if a physical server dies, so what - another physical server will take the strain. ifnact two could fail at teh same time and it still wouldnt be much of a problem No downtime apart from 2 or 3 minutes while the VM reboots. This is a key benefit with massive inpact for all teaching learning and administration, and one that if your SMT understand, probably will want to look at finding extra money for a decent SAN. The worst thing you could do would be to implement an poor/unreliable/non redundant SAN - and then have it all go pear shaped - you will have a seriously hard time convincing SMT that virtualisation is a good idea when all your VMs are down As for what to virtualise - yes you can virtualise SIMS, yes you can virtualise terminal servers, yes you can virtualise DC's. you just have to ensure that you have the approprate hardware and storage system specified so that you do not take any performance hit. Butuz

Yes - but will it provide fast reliable storage for your Xen boxes and all of your virtual servers for the next 5 years, lol. That is the BIG question. If your consolidating many servers and many different storage devices into few servers and one or two storage devices - it's wise not to skimp. Virtualisation is not something that should be done on the cheap - if your storage goes down - all your servers go down, if your storage is not fast enough, all your servers will underperform. Be a bit careful. If you can't afford the excellent Sun 7110 then look at HP 200i MSA. No where near as fast, reliable, or scalable as the SUN - but not as expensive either. Butuz

I'd be really interested in how you do that and what software you use! Cheers Butuz

I'd be interested to know how many watts thes use in use. Curently thin clients use 6 watts, RM Ecoquiet use 35 watts, normal PC uses 80+ watts. The main reasons for going thin client here have been1 1) initial cost price 2) electricity savings 3) ease of managment 4) much longer lifecycle I am guessing really the Atom only satisfies #1 above - does it satisfy #2 as well?? Butuz

Hi I've downloaded it but have not got it running yet. There's a lot going on here at the mo! Gonna slap it on an ESXi server today (or install VMWapre Player on my workstation!). Will let you know! Butuz

Where are you based Chris? Butuz

My dad used to use a Minolta Dimage Scan dedicated film scanner - could scan 5 slides at a time and the quality was excellent. They were expensive back then but I think you can get them quite cheap now. Butuz

Sounds like a good plan Chris. Might be worth testing Xen - I have it on good authority that it outperforms ESX currently. Working on an order for a much scaled down version of exactly what you are planning. Pair of mirrored Sun 7110's Two Sun Servers (Dual 3.16 Quad Core Xeons + 16GB RAM each) running ESX / XEN Two older RM Servers (Dual 2.33 Quad Core Xeons + 8GB RAM each) for redundancy. Let us know how you get on! Butuz