Butuz

You can change the SCSI ID actually on the tape drive usually via a dip switch or jumper. Very strange problem. Has the tape drive dissapeared from the SCSi BIOS before you get into windows? Butuz

Where are you getting your licences from David? MS Academic prices through aur LEA are waaaay cheaper: Windows 2003 Server Std : £48.71 Windows Terminal Services CAL: £8.99

Yep the reason I have gone from 0 - 100 thin clients in a year is because of sustainability. We simply cant afford to keep 300+ fat clients up and running in the long term - our budget goes down every year not up! Thin clients are one answer for us. Virtualisation is another, if we can get our 9 servers virtualised down to three we can save over £1k a year just on electricity costs alone! New technology is great Butuz

Lithium polymer batteries can only become unsafe if they are either overcharged, undercharged, or punctured. None of the above should happen with the type of helicopters we are talking about above as long as you use the charger that came with it. This is the same as Lithium Ion batteries as used in laptops/ipods/mobile phones etc - it's just that most people don't realise that a faulty charger could actually cause their phone to explode! Remember the issue with sony laptops combusting on peoples laps? Faulty charging technology caused that one. But I don't see people running around saying they will never ever buy a laptop again. The chance of it happening is low. Most of the videos you'll find of li-po's exploding are due to the fact they are being seriously abused and charged at 20x the rate they should be. You should never charge a battery unnatended. The same has always been true of all the battery types we have ever had. It's just explosions are so rare most people do not bother to stick to best practice!!! Butuz

Ok we learn something new every day that is what I like about this job! One question? As standard .exe files can not be run from USB memory sticks as standard - does this mean the encrypted memory sticks will not work? Cheers Butuz

Joy - we have to jump though hoops and spend £throusands to encrypt a few word documents containing little or no personal data that teachers may take off site - and all because the govmt' seem to have been intent on sending CD's full of our personal, private data through the postal service???? Anvil to crack a nut anyone? Butuz

I know exactly how you feel mate! 2006 budget - £50k, 2007 was £6.5k, 2008 worked out about £2.5k All the hard work I've put in over the last 7 years is basically being undone due to finances. Butuz

Hmm that is a very interesting little tit bit. Butuz

I thought you were only licenced for 4 virtual instances??? Or is that just Enterprise? Butuz

I downloaded it - but didnt Install it as I had already downloaded and installed teh free VMWare ESXi - I wanted to be able to do some testing of VMWare convertor (it works a treat by the way) and correct me if I am wrong, HyperV does not have any convertor software available. Butuz

I know you wanted to spend around £40 - but have a look at this: Fast Lad Performance It is absoloutly fantastic, its sooo small and cute, and yet at the same time sooo stable and easy to fly, and it seems to be semi-indestructable. If you can possibly afford it - get that one as it is by far the best of it's kind. Butuz

Our servers get a visual inspection. Do you still get the loud fan noise after reboots? If so - It sounds like maybe one of your fans have failed, usually if a fan fails all the others speed right up in order to make up for it. Andrew

Ah - I never read the hardware compatibility guide so I guess the guide doesnt apply Have you tried the latest version? ESXi 3.5 seems to install on any workstation I try it on, it also doesnt sem bothered what storage you use, SATA, SAS, SCSI, etc. I tried an older version quite a long time ago and it was very restricted it would only run on SCSI drives etc. Butuz

Then it's no different to if your local storage had failed. Except that your local storage is tied in to the physical server's raid card, wheras the iSCSI storage is not tied to any server. A big benefit in my eyes. It's the HDD's that are 99% most likely to fail, as long as your using good reliable SAS drives (not Deathstar's) and are using Raid 5 with hotspare you should get 99%+ uptime. You want to be using "enterprise" class hardware if your virtualising your whole network - anything by HP/DELL/IBM/Adaptec should be ultra fast and reliable. If your basing your SAN on some kind of Buffalo or Netgear jobby then I guess you'd better prepare for downtime? Yep. Redundant PSU, Redundant interface's, redundant hard drives. Couple that with a same day on site warranty and you should be laughing.

Agree with you - the iSCSI server needs to be a dedicated appliance to VMWare rather than a standard Windows server with an add on iSCSI initiator. Much much more reliable. Agree about SATA/SAS too, I would only use SATA disks for back up use or testing, I would stick to SAS disks for a production server. Butuz

Are you sure? I have not come across any. I have my test ESXi server running on a crappy 3 year old RM P4 3.6 single core Workstation with 2 gig ram? Butuz

On the contrary - I would say go with ESX3i server which is a free download - it takes 10 minutes to install it from the CD, You can mage it with Vmware infrastructure client which is a free download. The advanceced features that are lacking in the free version of ESXi are aimed at multiple physical server setups with SAN - not needed on a basic single server test setup to be honest. Trust me - it's easy to set up and it also gets you used to dealing with the ESX interface which is good for you when you do decide to virtualise everything. Just my 2p!

But that's the best bit about using ESXi - if you use an iSCSI storage server to host all of the VM's - then if your physical vmaware server actually fails, you can simply use any old spare server (or god forbid workstation if your desperate), install ESXi on the server, hook it up to the iSCSI box and then right click on all your VM's and re-import them. That way you can get all your VM's back up in 30 mins or so. If your using local storage and your physical server dies - what are you going to do then? You have to get your physical server repaired before you can get your VM's back up - this will take longer than 30 mins - I garuntee! The ESXi version is on the way. Cant wait for it meself! Butuz

Joomla! Extensions Directory - Project & Task Management Butuz

Many files simply can not be compressed. Not much anyone can do about it really. I always base my backup purcheses around the "uncompressed capacity" as this way any compression is a bonus. Butuz

Snap Servers - soooo fast I just want more more more!

What do you use to PDF them? Butuz

Hey - you signed on the dotted SMT line and took the payrise. NOW WHERE'S MY DAMN BEER! Butuz

Lots of newer machines are F2. Frankly I don't know why they just dont stick to delete!!!

Using Sharepoint Services 3 here on a Virtual Win2k3 VMWare ESX3i and thats running on a P4 3.6Ghz with 2GB ram and an old 72GB SCSI hard drive. Runs shweeeeet Butuz