pantscat

Do you just want to restrict exchange for internal mail?

Is there newer firmware available for the switches? Generally speaking that's the first thing that HP would get you to do...

Do you use a proxy for internet access?

Caught this little chap while testing out my new lens (Sigma 50-500): Robin at Wisley by Ant, on Flickr

Hi dsearles... Is the Microsoft Exchange System Attendant service running? Try restarting it...

Both, set it on the server and the zones.

Scavenging - turn it on... https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc759204(v=ws.10).aspx

That sounds like lightspeed isn't matching AD groups properly. I'm not really familiar with Lightspeed stuff though, so can't help. Soz! Good luck.

Can you not add the IP address with the correct subnet after it? e.g. 10.10.10.10/24? EDIT... Scrap that - add the ip address wth a /32 after it. Try that.

I did the same thing about 18-ish months ago. Felt too comfortable working in the same place and decided to do something different. Certainly not any harder in the "real world" - just different, as long as it's a decent company and you enjoy the work, then that's fine! Personally, the job I moved into didn't quite fulfil my expectations, so did it for three months and then did some contracting for a while, and setup my own company doing consultancy and support - and I've not been this happy in years (career-wise). So all-in-all, a very positive experience. Good luck!

It's a straightforward process to p2v a SIMS server. Generally speaking you want it to have fast storage, and in an ideal world enough RAM so that it can have most or all of the mdb in memory (so depends on the size of your SIMS database) A couple of CPU cores should be sufficient.

Well, most servers you can update the bios from within the bios menu itself... is that an option?

Lol... good point.

What make/model is the server? I wonder if there's a bios or firmware update that'll help.

Are you in the bios whilst a usb disk is plugged in?

It is tricky... but it's a case of weighing up likelihood of failure, and what the most important thing is to you/your school. SANs will generally have built-in redundancy - network, power, controllers... which mitigates some of the risk. Using a server as a SAN doesn't have quite the same level of redundancy... but a decent server should be pretty reliable. Don't forget that with Veeam you can use instant restore which will start up the VMs from their last good backup directly from the backup device.

Even with HA you won't get zero downtime - there'll still be a delay while the VMs are booted up on the 'spare' host. With what you've got currently, you have the following options: 1. Go to Hyper-V and use its built-in features to replicate the VMs to a second host. 2. Stay with VMware and use Veeam to replicate the VMs to a second host. 3. Use one of the physical servers and turn it in to a SAN - Perhaps use 2012 R2 server and windows storage spaces to present the storage to VMware via iscsi.

Try burning the ISO to usb with this - Universal USB Installer – Easy as 1 2 3 | USB Pen Drive Linux

USB media?

Hmm... leave the partitions as it is, and re-install windows on it? Then take ownership of all the files and you'll have access to them.

Yep, that's an idea. Alternatively you could stick with VMware if you're already familiar and happy with it, and just use Veeam to replicate to another host, which you can then fire up manually. VSAN is a nice idea... in practice though it's expensive and probably not a great deal cheaper than a dedicated SAN depending upon your workload.

No, it really needs to be shared storage - it could be a NAS or a SAN.

If you're running essentials plus, then HA will do the job nicely. You'll need a vcentre server, an additional host and shared storage that both hosts can access. Let me know if you need any pointers... I'm a VCP.

No - it just unpacks the files to a folder - it's fine.

You'll only be able to use the specific 2012R2 settings from a 2012R2 server or a Win8.1 client. The 2008R2/Win7 templates are here: Download Administrative Templates (ADMX) for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 from Official Microsoft Download Center