Trapper

Well our budget isn't great, so I've been told to pare everything right back to the bone. I've gone for original DL 380 G9 with dual CPU 64GB RAM and a few TB of storage. Alongside it will be two our our current ML 380s each of which runs 6 VMs with no trouble at all for failover. It works and provides redundancy. I had to read between the lines a bit to find out why the encouragement to spend it all and get it right, had turned into much more reserved "Do we NEED this now?". I get the feeling we've wandered into a bit of a tightrope situation! Thanks for the advice, all of has been exceptionally useful. I've had to pare more back to get the Datacentre licensing, I've managing on some old perpetual 2008 R2 licenses for Standard I inherited, but they just do not stretch far enough now! Also an extra question: if you have ONE school, but split over THREE sites (one of which is a mile away) is it still considered ONE school?

I've been struggling with this for months now. They've given me a huge budget, just under £20k for the new secondary site. Which will house 100 kids max as KS3/4 age. As we're a special we really do not use IT in the same way a mainstream does. No video editing, no media work, mostly Office, internet and some locally installed apps. I've taken to thinking of our three sites primary, secondary and Post-16 as in effect using IT like three one form entry primary schools. My SLT expects the new secondary site to be all singing and all dancing. Massive iron powering mega-jigga-terra flops. When really all we need is 5/6 VMs to run AD, apps 1, apps2, MIS etc and a few TB of storage space. The primary and P-16 sites require less. 3/4 VMs max at each site with the same storage for DFS to replicate everyone's data. It's been difficult to say "No, I really do not need a server room our local 1500 pupil secondary school would beg for, all I need is £5/6k to sort everything out". I also hate to think of the Head's expression when he looks into our new server room and see's one box!

So you wouldn't go for a SAS device? I assume it's overkill... DAS is a bit useless with two servers, unless one serves it via iSCSI but that's a bit faffy Problem is we could afford two high specced servers with fibre channel and a SAS with 2.4TB well under budget, but I feel it's just wasteful. We might run 10 VMs total - max of 250 kids across three sites (special) from 3-19. We've never done anything anywhere near like main stream secondaries do.

What would you use for storage? It's been a very long time since I last bought enterprise class storage! So long it was a SCSI connection!

That's a plan. Luckily we have enough money to mirror the set up at the other two sites. Yes the annex sites will run at lot less, but if I can get the replication right it might be a pretty good way to sort out backup!

What would you get? I'm trying to get with three decent spec'd HP servers to run Hyper-V instances. Two in use, one as a hot migrate to. All connected to a storage array where the VMs live. Would you do this? If you would what would you choose? Assume 4/5 VMs per host. Not that I have to make this a reality in .... 3 weeks!

Did anyone else watch the Space-X launch? I can't believe they've finally proved the concept of landing a first stage. Now the hard work begins, proving you can re-use it cheaply enough for it to be worth it... I think I woke the missus when I started shouting!

There was (could have changed) an odd thing in Birmingham. If a school bought their EES via Link2ICT when you went on the VLSC you'd find your keys had been activated x100 times. It looks like you all join one massive EES subscription and share the keys. Must be a total nightmare to manage. They'd have to request more activations fairly often, and imagine what happens if one of those keys gets into the wild. There'd be no accountability! I've always bought mine via Capita and all the emails come direct from MS and get added to our VLSC account. If RM are just reselling then they shouldn't be with holding anything. If RM are doing what Link2ICT in Birmingham are doing, then you might have a problem.

I love how if the guidance software in the IMU was this --> <-- out the S-V would actually run into the launch tower

Yup it's down again. Interesting that it's affecting JANet. Just had the text, a "small number of schools" are having problems

Far too much money to move to SIMS from CMIS and it really is irritating. Link2ICT seem to lump the conversion costs on to stop schools from moving. I can't understand why Birmingham schools went from SIMs in the 1990s to Facility. Some stuck with SIMs and they really are reaping the benefits now. Facility just doesn't cut it. We've lost highly skilled office staff because they just find Facility far too frustrating!

Yup just had them call for my mobile number for further updates. That ain't a good sign! Office 365 yesterday and the whole internet today. I am not riding high with reputation this week. Must be a massive problem with the core proxies. According to my Solar Winds, and my techie who had stuff downloading all night it went off at around 0430am.

Still down for me. The Service desk didn't know about until they were bombarded with calls at 8am

Hoping not just me. Getting the L2ICT error page so I am at least hitting the proxy servers

Apparently this is my fault and it's poor performance that I'm not fixing it. Amazing. Companies across the world are probably loosing millions over this, and I get it in the neck as some people can't send a chuffing email. There are days I hate education. Being blamed for a worldwide outage of one of the premier cloud services has to be one of those.

Yeah the MS guy did that. Every other group is fine. You can create, add, remove and no problems. I'm starting to wonder whether it's a glitch. This group was created in cloud five years ago as part of a Live@Edu tenancy, it's been moved around, the code base has changed countless times and now it's changed to an on prem managed group. There are a lot of things that could be causing it.

Yeah well... bit different to be on the receiving end of an IT blag rather than giving it! Just created a rule to auto-delete any emails she receives from the group for the time being.

Well MS have been on. They showed me the group membership in PowerShell and the user wasn't on it, so they said the replication to the web interface was taking a while. Being an old hand at the old IT blagarooney I sent a test email and.... the user gets it.

Righto... I've created a test security group in AD with an smtp address. Added two members, synced and it appeared. Removed me from it and synced and yup the changes went through. Got to be a problem with this group. Next idea... delete the SLT group from AD and sync and see what happens?

And nope not adding me either, but the connector is processing the changes....

Also run a preview of a full and delta sync of that group and the membership is fine - the same as AD so I'm assuming the issue is on the Azure side rather than on prem. Well at least I didn't screw it up! Funny thing is when it updated the group from cloud to AD synced it added this member of staff, who has only been back in this group a few days. Looks like it is allowing additions, but not removals. Actually I'll try adding myself in from AD and sync it back...

Nope none there

Console and running the scheduled task. The log is showing the correct members for the group, but not in cloud. It's rather bizzare. All other changes I've run this morning such as user info (address, phones etc.) and additional smtp addresses have synced fine.

Anyone come across this? Bit of background our SLT group was created in cloud ages ago. When I ran the first full sync this morning it was updated to be synced from on prem. That's fine. I noticed that one ex-SLT member was still in the AD SLT group and she still needs access to all the same shares, so it was just simpler to leave her in. After the DirSync obviously she was added to the O365 SLT group. Now when I remove her from the group in AD and sync - nothing changes. When I try and remove her via the Exchange web console, it won't let me as the group is managed on prem. I've got MS looking at it, but I'd rather get her out ASAP. It's not a major issue as she's still SLT-ish and she wouldn't tell anyone she got any emails in the interim, I'd just prefer to avoid that. Any ideas?

Ahhhh fixed! Turned directory sync off and back on.... Who says IT is purely restarting balky kit?!