Paid_Peanuts

All, I have just been asked if we can disable the send and receive of emails (O365) between certain times of day (7pm - 6am) and at weekends? This would be for internal emails and external emails for all staff. This is to promote staff well being and for them not to feel obliged to respond to emails received during these unsociable times. I know you can use the "Work Offline" within Outlook but most users have their mail setup on their phones. Also the majority of our staff use the web access. Is this possible with O365? If so does anyone on here do such a thing and if so how is it going?

We have recently found CS4 installs onto the various versions: 1607, 1709 & 1803. It gives an install error when it gets to Flash CS4. You can accept the error and continue with the installation. All apps work within the suite with the exception of Photoshop CS4. For us this loads, appears to work OK until you open a second image. It then hangs and crashes. This behaviour is consistent across the 3 different builds of Windows 10 above. We have installed the 11.0.2 update to Photoshop and tried it in both x64 and x86 version of Photoshop - no difference. We have tried it on all 3 different builds as the first installed app and the problem exits not for the user that installed the app but any other user, whether they be local admins or not. Behaviour exists with local files or network files. If anyone has any suggestions on how to possibly resolve this I’d be very grateful as the alternative is a circa £4500 per year subscription to Adobe CC.

Would echo that statement. Been using Dell for upwards of 13 years now and 100% faith in their kit. Currently have a compellent and it’s he best thing we’ve ever had. As for HP the only place they have in my organisation is in the switching.

Works here. Our RDS hosts are 2016 fully patched. Firstly put the RDS host into install mode: change user/install Then deployed SIMS through SOLUS 3. Once install was complete, ran: chnage user/execute to take RDS host out of install mode. On the RDS gateway server, published Pulsar.exe Works like it should. Occasionally we have SIMS hang for a user, so we have to go into server manager on the gateway server and logoff their session. This is more a SIMS issue (bad programming) rather than an RDS issue.

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I think there is some Genee Vision software IRC which can open Promethean or Smart files. Site license is cheap also - might be worth checking out then you can point staff in that direction when opening files on your new interactive panels [emoji3]

Neverware basically do the same thing but instead of all the integration with Google, they do an Office 365 version! So you can boot it similar to a Chromebook but instead of Google Docs, Sheets, Drive etc. You get all the shortcuts to all the Microsoft O365 equivalents.

But surely, this is a problem with AWS/Azure/Google is that your interfacing with your content across a WAN link, which in most cases, can be the single point of failure and introduces other issues like latency etc. I don't know what your experience of online storage is like but when we tried it here on mass with OneDrive we had complaints in all over the place that it was slow etc. We timed it to upload 200MB of content took 40 seconds. A copy of that size to our servers takes only a few seconds. It is this interaction with files that annoys our onsite users to the point where we have largely discounted online services at the moment. We have a 500MB MIA so it isn't the fact we have a saturated link - far from it. At times of testing I have done it out of hours when our connection is barely being used. i'm still to be convinced of using AWS/Azure etc. I also found the cost to be astronomical.

I was quoted: DataCore SANsymphony-V Datacore HS32 - Virtual SAN with 32TB licence and one year support and it was almost £9500! Cost was then approx £1800 a year there after - seemed expensive! Even compared to VMware vSAN!

Problem is because of the storage efficiency of using vSAN or DataCore, the cost of the performance disks (SSD) cripple the price. Sure, you can buy plenty of 4/6/8TB drives for the capacity, but the costs of the SSD to maintain a 20& flash ratio from the likes of HP/Dell/Lenovo push the price up massively.

In a theoretical world, if you had a budget of £50,000 to spend on refreshing your ageing server equipment (compute + storage), where would you put your money? Say you needed to run 50 VM's approx. and had a 30TB requirement, and weren't bothered whether you ran VMware/Hyper-V what would you do? Would you: Use vSAN or equivalent like: DataCore/StarWind? Use Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct S2D? Keep storage local to the hosts and run VMs locally and invest in a suitable backup solution in case of host or storage issue? Use 2/3/4/5 hosts? Would you buy a SAN, if so what kind of disks would you like to fill it with? If you were to buy a SAN what connection type would you choose? SAS/iSCSI/Fibre?

Anyone have any Lenovo storage they are willing to share their thoughts on?

Does anyone within the Edugeek community have a Lenovo DS4200 SAN? If so i'd be interested to know what your feedback is. Currently investigating the DS4200 as a potential replacement to some ageing EqualLogic kit. It would be good to hear any first hand experiences with the DS4200 instead of listening to sales speel.

I am contemplating buying Lenovo servers and storage as part of a refresh project. We currently have Dell server/storage kit and have been very happy with it. When we have had to call in a warranty part, they dealt with it promptly and part arrives next business day. Anyone with Lenovo/IBM server and storage kit? What has been your experience of their support? Please put my mind at ease, I am fearful of moving to Lenovo in order to save some money and possibly regretting the decision later when we need support/warranty. Any feedback appreciated.

Huh? Not sure I understand what your saying? The point I was making was NetApp supplied me with a quote for something daft, in the order of £50k! For nothing more special than Dell/IBM have quoted for. Looking at the SAN element alone, Dell and IBM are less that 30% of the NetApp quote.

Recently got a NetApp quote. They wanted more for the storage alone then the likes of Dell or IBM wanted for their entire solution (3 hosts, iSCSI switches and SAN). I told NetApp in no uncertain terms, if they couldn't revise the price then not to contact me again. Suffice to say I haven't heard back.

VMware aren't discontinuing vSAN that I know of or have heard after speaking to lots of VMware partners. Quite the opposite actually, from what I've been told VMware see vSAN as one of their biggest USPs moving forward. Their are lots of big boys out there using vSAN.

vSAn is very good by VMware, however the licensing costs are high and the annual support is expensive. To give you an idea we had a price for 3 dual core hosts, including 5 years support the cost for vSAN standard came out at almost £14k. For advanced license (includes dedupe and compression) including 5 years SnS came to approx £24k.

Thanks. Actually they only come with 1 years warranty and I thought £425 is a bit steep.

I am after replacement Promethean 78" boards, like the ones here https://www.ebay.com/p/Promethean-ActivBoard-78-System-in-Working/1718555919?iid=361538385104 If anyone has any of these boards surplus to requirements I'd be very happy to talk to you. (Not expecting any freebies)

I am currently looking to replace our existing servers which are almost of the same spec, dual 6 core, 192GB. Only thing mine don't have is internal storage. Can I ask how many VM are you planning on running on this proposed spec? Are you going to run Hyper-V, assuming you are, are you planning on running storage spaces? If you are, how are you configuring the drives and how many additional drives will you have to purchase as S2D on 3 hosts has a 33% efficiency rate? Which make/model of SSD are you planning on using? Going from £13.5k to £19k is £5.5k difference across 3 hosts. Less than £2k per host for SSD upgrades? Will these be enterprise mixed use SSD?

I don't believe everything you said below to be true. My thoughts to your statements above.

Can I ask why not? I am going through the process of pricing up our replacement kit (currently consists of 3 hosts and SAN using VMware Essentials Plus). The indicative pricing I have received so far would indicate that 4 hosts in an S2D configuration, or 3 hosts using S2D with one as a replica is no cheaper then 3 better spec'd hosts connected to a SAN. I appreciate the SAN may be the single point of failure in that setup, but i would like to bet you have many more single point of failures within your organisation which are far more likely to fail before a SAN does.

I’m assuming you are using Hyper-V? Otherwise these hyperconverged solutions from Stone/Dell are no good to you if you utilise VMware Essentials Plus using 3 hosts.

Sophos = yes it can, XG version anyway