Butuz

i've yet to test the HP Liftime Garuntee as I've not had one HP Procurve switch fail yet and I've bought about 30 over the last 6 years from the old 2524s to the 2600s and more recently 2800s and 4xxx series. Ordering some 2548s this year. You can't really go wrong with HP or Cisco but I went HP because I like the underdogs, and they've done massive amounts of work over the last 7 years in driving down the cost of networking (by constantly uncercutting Cisco whilst mostly matching the specs). Butuz

Waiting on new Test Servers for me to to try the Xen Convertor - but on VMWare you can either boot the server to be converted from the Vmware convertor CD and instruct it to convert to the Vmware server of your choice, or you can actually install the VMWare convertor software onto the server to be converted and then instuct it to convert. The option to boot from the CD is best (no covertor software footprint left on server) and I think Xen only supports the bootable CD method which is fine. The VMWare convertor was very good, and successfuly converted eveything I tried, from terminal servers to member servers to RM CC3 XP machines. Hope the Xen convertor is just as impressive! Butuz

They might be s**t but as long as theyre paying for edugeek they can carry on! Butuz

I sense a most highly sneaky edit good sir!!!!! Butuz

TBH The Free version is so feature filled compared to ESXi that I would question whether you really need to spend £1000+ extra per server to get automatic HA? If a server failed you could manually restart the VMs on another Xen server - still a million times easier and quicker than having to actually rebuild / restore a physical server!! Butuz

Andy Can it use Xen to provide VDI images? Butuz

By the way your little mini website doesnt actually state the date as far as I can see! I'm coming! I wanted to come to Lancashire and see Ric anyway! Kills 2 birds with 1 stone! Butuz

Hmm. From what I've seen around here - Sci techs are on around the same money as ICT Techs. In my oppinion ICT Techs have to have more specialist knowledge than Sci Techs - and also the field of Practical Science does not change beyond recognition every single year in the same way ICT does. A sci tech can do the job for 10 years without really doing much different. Maybe some new initiatives or safety rules yes - but science as a field does not seem to change much at all. Also - a Sci tech only caters for 1 department and perhaps only 5 teachers out of 70 odd? An ICT tech caters for every single pupil in the school, every department, both curriculum and admin, and every member of staff both teaching and non teaching. This, I believe is a level of responsibility above that of Science techs. Thats just my 2p! No offence to any Sci techs intended!!! Schools in general need more science techs, that is for sure as one is not enough - but I do not believe they are required to be particularly generously paid also. Butuz

Well - Oracle is a darn site better than IBM thats for sure. At least Oracles product portfolio isnt in full competition with Suns! Butuz

I would suggest Viewsonic or Iiyama 26" TFT's. Support 1080p, VGA and HDMI for your Xbox, and VGA/DVI for your PC. £300. Admittedly a fair bit smaller than a 32" TV but frankly £400 32" TV's dont support 1080p resolutions - so are less good for viewing PC and Xbox. Butuz

I've run VMWare Server and MS Virtual PC on the same box under Windows XP. Butuz

Yep we'll be virtualising terminal servers. I am not in a position to do testing yet - once I have some server hardware to test on I'll be able to do some performance testing on the virtualised terminal servers. Cheers Butuz

Working fine here on IE6 and IE7! Butuz

Yes email Andy he is much more privvy to accurate information and he has helped me out no end! I understand the importance being able to get hold of ballpark costs before you speak in depth with a supplier though - it's a pet peeve of mine suppliers that keep costs totally secret untill you actually place an order - luckily Andy @ Cutter seems happy to talk ballpark though so I am sure he wont mind this post! As your starting virtualisation from scratch you'r gonna need at least two servers and a SAN. Here are a few scenarios for you based on what I have been planning here with Matching Grant prices. Option 1. Budget option if you don't have many servers to virtualise. http://www.butuz.net/images/virtualisation/virtualisation-min.jpg Option 2. In between option if you have quite a few servers to virtualise. http://www.butuz.net/images/virtualisation/virtualisation-med.jpg Option 3. Ideal option if you have lots of servers to virtualise and want redunancy via dual server rooms. http://www.butuz.net/images/virtualisation/virtualisation-max.jpg Reason I have stuck with two servers in each option is basically to minimise the number of physical servers needed per option (maximum server conspolidation whilst still keeping a high level of redundancy). E.g for option three you could use 8 x Sun Fire X4100M2 instead of the 2 x Sun Fire 4600s. It would cost approx the same to buy, but running costs would be more expensive, e.g higher electricity usage, higher cost of warrantys after 3 year honeymoon period, more XEN servers to manage and maintain. Your milage may vary! Hope this helps. Butuz

Ah thanks for signing up just to speak to me!!!! Nice to see I am not the only person in the world that assumed managing HP thin clients would be easy! Yep - I discovered device, typed in the correct IP range and nothing. Nada. 0 devices found even though at last 30 were on both linux and windows ce 5. Firewall is disabled ETC on the server can't realy see anything wrong with my setup? I won't be buying any more HP Devices that's for sure. Butuz

Agree with much of what neil says. Modern quad core servers are at least 4x more powerful than older single core Xeon's and getting soo much more powerful every day. I have a dual single core Xeon 3.6 system thats two years old now and can very often struggle if a class of 20 are using flash websites - I've seen 100% cpu usage often with averages of over 50 - neil is right, some flash websites are very badly programmed and can use 10% cpu per client! The same class of 20 on one of our Dual Quad Core 2.5 systems barely even manage to breech 15% cpu usage with an average of about 5%. So basically, don't expect great results on older server hardware. As for Citrix / Sun Ray etc - I think if your experimenting with thin client it is perfectly feisible to buy one server and just use standard win2k3/win2k8 terminal services on it. It will give you a good idea of how thin client's can work for very little outlay. If you then like what you see you can jump in at the deep end with Citrix and SUN. One thing to take note of is that in terms of multimedia performance on a vanilla terminal server setup (without Cirix/Sun's clever multimedia software optimisations) - it's the thin client device that is all important. If you use something like a HP T5135 then multimedia performance will be very poor with not even youtube clips able to play without singificant breakup. On the other hand, if you use one of the newer breed multimedia clients such as Axel M80f you will be able to play youtube clips all day long with no breakup, and even full screen video can be attempted with a small amount of jerkyness/breakup. The M80f is a breakthrough in my eyes as you get very acceptible multimedia performance on video, flash websites for at least 1/4 of the price of other powerful thin clients from HP/wyse etc. Also - if you are a vanilla terminal server site (like me) and have multiple servers with no load balancing set up - have a look at 2x Software Loadbalancer. It's a work of genius, install the 2x server software on a Win2k3 or above server, install the tiny 2x client software onto each terminal server, add all terminal servers into a load balancing group - hep presto all your TS's are load balanced in real time based on CPU/RAM/Network. I have trialed it here on the 30 day trial available and it works a treat, I woud go so far as to say it's the best kept secret for Vanilla TS users. OF course, it aint Citrix, but for £500 for 4 servers or £800 for 8 servers with no extra client licences needed - it's in a whole different cost league to Citrix. Now that we are looking to expand usage past 100 clients and 2/3 servers I am looking seriously at Sun Ray and Citrix Presentation Server. So far sun Ray is in the lead as it is platform agnostic and can run on top of Vanilla Windows, Citrix, Linux. Butuz

Virtualization for starters. Find an old P4 Workstation - Install VMWare ESXI 3.5..... play..... well that's how I did it Butuz

Care to explain the niggly, flaky and unreliable a bit further Outpost? Some of us here may actually be able to help! Butuz

Oh well - I guess you can't have your cake and eat it! Butuz

Local authority staff shjould cover most technicians / network managers? Thanks for bringing it up I am gonna try and make that.

The SUN Fire X4440 is unbelieveably well priced when two of them are bought on matching grant (£5k each). The equivalent spec Dell R905 will set you back £9k. So with SUN I am hoping to get a total of 8CPU's, 32 Cores, 32GB RAM for under £10k. Dell equivalent would cost £18k for what I need. Also because I am buying 2 x SUN servers I qualify for buying a 7110 SAN at half price too - thus saving even more money - as Dell SAN's are silly money. If your doing a larger scale virtualisation - you could go for 2 x Sun Fire 4600's on matching grant, which would give you 16 CPU's, 64 Cores, 128GB RAM for £19k. Dell Equivilent ( 4 x R905's) would cost £38596. Franky - anyone buying anything other than SUN at the moment is clinically insane IMHO! It's not as if the SUN servers are crap either - they appear to be far better designed than the equiv IBM/DELL/HP's. Butuz

Blade servers use lots of power - so yes that sounds about right. Butuz

Hoping to have a couple of Sun 64bit boxes incoming soon which which to consolidate 5 member servers into (and hopefully some terminal servers too pending testing). Have not got a 64bit box at the moment so cant actually test xen server! Butuz

Little Miss - What hardware are you running on the APC 1000? Generally, the only thing that will make a battery swell or vent is badly overloading it. It might be worth looking at getting a more powerful UPS. Something like a APC 2200 or 3000 would be a nice upgrade I would think. Butuz

Whoops got my cores wrong. You could use Ubuntu - I am going to set up at least one Ubuntu terminal server to trial but I am worried about how it will intergrate with AD, and what applications I will actually be able to run on it. No MS Stuff, No Adobe, No Macromedia. Butuz