Roberto

It cost us less money to purchase SCVMM to manage our virtual infrastructure on HyperV and pay for Windows Datacentre licences for the hosts than it would have cost to renew the support for our VSphere installation for one more year... and we'd have still needed to buy the Datacenter licences. I've certainly found HyperV to be reliable, from the Windows 2012 server version onwards I'd say it's been just fine.

Xen, HyperV and VMware ESXi are all good platform choices. I've got the most experience with the latter two, and of them I think that VMware ESXi is the better product if you're buying it as part of a Vsphere package (which are most certainly not cheap) which is what you'll need to do in order to enable all the features available in ESXi. Vsphere/ESXi is fairly easy to set up and get going because it basically is dedicated to creating and managing virtual workloads. HyperV makes all of its features available for free wherever you use HyperV server (which is a free product in its own right, I'm not just talking about enabling the HyperV role in Windows server). However, it's harder to use, especially if you're not fully comfortable with Powershell and configuring windows via a command line. HyperV is easily set up on just one server but _does_ become more complex when you do other things with it because the more complex stuff is built on top of other windows server features (e.g. virtual clusters use windows clustering, patching uses WSUS, etc). Anyway, whichever product you choose, as long as you're aware of its limits and you're sure they fit in with your needs you'll be making a great choice. They're all good virtual host platforms. What you should consider is what kind of reliability you expect and require; no matter how good the hardware it can break down. No matter how good the virtual host platform, they _all_ have their bugs and issues and need patching to work at their best. If you want to virtualise several servers that represent a critical workload onto one physical box then you're putting all your eggs in one basket and, well sometimes bad stuff happens no matter how careful we are right? To that end, if the workload is critical then you need to be considering creating two or more virtual host servers to mirror/share the virtual server workload so that if one breaks down the virtual systems running on top of it can "fail over" to the other server and keep going. This is well worth doing and we've done it with ESXi/Vsphere and then HyperV here for a number of years and we're really happy with it, but the costs do start to rise, if only in terms of complexity and time spent supporting it. I'm not saying this to put you off - I think most workloads can and should be virtualised these days and I can't imagine doing without it now, but it does need to be planned and implemented carefully if you want to get the best out of it.

We've recently completed an exercise in renewing or replacing our firewall and filtering solution. We've chosen to renew our Sonicwall solution for another three years; there were several options that "ticked the boxes" for us but renewing the Sonicwall appeared to be the most cost-effective solution for us this time round. I will say that I thought Smoothwall were both very good in terms of the quality of the solution and also very competitive on price. I also found Watchguard and the Sophos UTM to be quite interesting options alongside the Sonic and Smooth walls, and I daresay I'd have been happy with any of those four from a technical perspective as well as price. I do think the solutions can be quite costly overall but this is a cost of functioning as an educational institute in today's online world. I certainly thing the cost of even the most expensive solution we looked at (and I'm talking about ones I've not mentioned here that quickly moved out of the running due to price) are considerably less than the cost of being the victim of data theft or many of the other security or safeguarding pitfalls these things help protect against. I'm astonished that you're looking at Websense while complaining at the cost of Smoothwall; the last time I looked at websense (as a former customer) it was a web filtering solution only. Smoothwall is a firewall and filtering solution (as are the others I mention here) and without wishing to discuss the quotes I've had for either product as I think all the vendors concerned would regard that as confidential, Smoothwall were quoting slightly less for a 3-year licence for Smoothwall running on a S14 box at today's prices than Websense quoted me to renew their software-only web-filtering solution several years ago.

Still struggling to run 5k - I can if I have to but I really don't want to! Last run I did was about 45 mins or so, so not much of a run really. I'd still rather walk - can do 5 miles in about an hour and 20. Either way, I'm down from 18.5 stones or so in August 2014 to 11.9 stones now and feeling great. Got to be happy with that, especially in my mid-40s these days.

I'm the infrastructure manager at my place. I have pretty much the same desktop that everyone else has in the college - an i3 with 4gb of ram. I haven't had a problem with it, though I have one of the SSDs installed that we give to power users (and have recently started rolling out by default). I do have a nice 24" monitor on my desk alongside the standard 19" one, and I do have a (5 year old) Macbook pro with a core i5 processor, which has been upgraded with an SSD. If I can't work with equipment that is at least similar to what the end users are working with, how am I to have any idea of what their user experience is like?

Yes. It was written to address a slightly different issue but this answer on serverfault goes into a fair bit of detail that should cover what you need. No. You will need to configure VLANs on the edge switches and you will need to consider how to route between those VLANs and you will (as covered in my serverfault answer) need to configure DHCP/BOOTP forwarders on the edge switches but you don't need configure the DHCP server itself - if you think about it, how would this work? If the clients needed an option given to them by the DHCP server to find the DHCP server then how would they ever get that option in the first place?

This is the downside of _any_ cloud provider. They're not interested in solving your problems or my problems. They're interested in solving their problems. If we're lucky, they'll have included "the majority of our customers' problems" in the set of "their problems" and we'll be in the majority of their customers. There is an element of "need to change how you work to be more in line with the cloud" here too, in fairness, and I suspect that Google's products are designed around the expectation that all the people using GAFE will be doing so from a individually assigned chromebook.

I'm honestly unsure what you're trying to say here. VMWare ESXi, and HyperV Server are both operating systems. They both provide a bootable environment which runs a "bare metal" hypervisor. How are they a totally different design?

Yes, it's rock-solid. Hasn't given me an ounce of trouble.

I think the Fire stick and main TV box are great bits of kit. The full sized one, which we have in our lounge, is much better than the stick, on our bedroom telly (and nearer the router, in my study), which has occasionally dropped off our wireless network which is fixed by my other half putting me on a charge until I restart the wifi router, and this seems to have got better with an upgrade of the router firmware, which suggests the problem isn't entirely the Fire Stick's fault.

Not much of interest here. Our domain was built as a RM CC4 domain back in 2002 and also the parent of a multi-domain forest. We got rid of CC4 years ago but have seen no reason to re-create the domain at any time.

Assuming you have W2016 keys available in the VLSC you can update the RTM Eval that's up for download here to a fully licensed install of Windows 2016 server as follows (tested here this morning): 1. Open an Admin command prompt. 2. Check what edition of Windows is installed with this command: DISM /online /Get-CurrentEdition (It might say something like "Current Edition : ServerDatacenterEval" 3. See what versions you can licence (assuming you have keys for them) with DISM /online /Get-TargetEditions. 4. Then run DISM /online /Set-Edition: /ProductKey:XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX /AcceptEula, where is the edition you want to convert to, and the value for ProductKey is your valid server key. For example: DISM /online /Set-Edition:ServerDataCenter /ProductKey:AAAAA-BBBBB-CCCCC-DDDDD-EEEEE /AcceptEula 5. Restart the server and check to see if its properly licensed (You can do this from the GUI: Settings, Update and Security, Activation)... Mine was not (It had changed the product key and failed to activate the first time, and I had to enter the product key again to activate successfully). 6. There are a few zero-day Windows Updates for W2016 server. Be sure to install them before using it in anger. No, seriously.

Ages since I visited edugeek. Yes it happened and yes they were serious. :-(

As much as I personally would also struggle with that, you need to accept that you and I are not the world. There are people right here in this thread that have found the 16Gb model to be up to their needs and one of them said they'd resent having to pay extra for more capacity if Apple did that. I know quite a few people who don't store music locally because Spotify and who don't keep photos locally because cloud backup of one kind or another. They use their phone in a way that doesn't require a lot of local capacity. Again, I'm not a fan of the 16gb model myself, but if it really didn't mean anyone's needs then it wouldn't sell. If it didn't sell then Apple would have figures reflecting that (and more than that, they'd probably have device health monitoring figures that showed people having capacity issues on devices they had sold) and if they couldn't sell the devices and/or couldn't support them afterwards due to capacity issues then they'd do something about that. Apple are not exactly known for keeping products that aren't selling in their lineup.

You're apparently ignoring the people above who appear to be doing just fine with 16Gb. Now, I get you, I really do. I couldn't make do with the 16Gb phone either and I'll be glad to see the back of it. I can cheerfully fill my 64Gb iPhone's storage without breaking a sweat. But neither you or I are Apple's whole customer base. They wouldn't be selling it if they didn't have data that suggested it was an important option for them. Options, choices, are a good think even if I don't understand why anyone would pick certain choices. In a way, I find the existence of the 16Gb iPad to be more confusing than the existence of the 16Gb iPhone.

So much this. UAC isn't the problem. It's a symptom. An external plug-in drive that requires admin access to work isn't suitable in this day and age. Simple as that.

If your BIOS can only see 4Gb then there's either a system limitation or hardware issue. Messing around with Windows or alternate operating systems is a waste of time until that's resolved.

The outcome depends on three things - your budget, how disruptive a gradual change can be to T&L, and what, precisely, you think the issue at hand actually is. So the questions you need to be asking yourself and SLT are: What should your new network be? Are you fundamentally happy with what you have, except that it's old and slow? Do you currently have your entire campus covered with APs and do you anticipate a large growth in the number of devices you need to support? What services need to be running over the wireless network? 20 laptops spread around a campus that browse and edit documents on a shared network area will not need the sort of system you will want if you're actually talking about 5 tightly-packed classrooms with 20 tablets in each room streaming video. Do you have a problem with Netgear and would therefore like to move to another platform? If you're happy with Netgear, will the two controllers support more up-to-date APs than the current ones? If you're near the limits (or supported life) of the current controllers then this may be an opportunity to consider a totally different platform but this will probably incur a larger cost, but if you have lots of wiggle-room with the current controllers then you may be able to upgrade the APs connected to it for a relatively small outlay. If you move to a new system, and wish to do so gradually, this will probably affect the ability of people to 'roam' throughout the building painlessly. How much of a requirement do you have here? A gradual change will require you to support the two networks, enrol devices onto both networks, etc, too, and this will increase the cost of supporting the network.

There were plenty of claims around a few years ago that apple would never support integration with Exchange on either iOS or Mac OSX. Never say never.

Honestly, I think it looks like a good piece of work, but if this is aimed at end users, I think it will run aground on the rocks of human nature: users simply don't understand crypto and the vast majority of them don't want to take the time to learn. If it can't be handled either automatically with no input by them at all (or at most, one tickbox in Outlook) then they won't understand it and won't use it... nothing you've done wrong, just human nature.

I think the issue is that no one can currently answer the question about what will be the most cost effective solution in 3 or 4 years time. It's not that long ago that the default position on email for a lot of organisations is that you would host it on-site unless you had special circumstances that made cloud a better bet. These days, I think that's reversed. I can see that possibly becoming the case for other services such as SQL databases on cloud instances, maybe even Azure AD becoming more of a player in day-to-day network management, for example... but no one knows for sure. And Microsoft and other vendors are entitled to make a living from their own hard work when all's said and done.

I'm not colour blind and I still find it horrific and difficult to read / understand. If I saw it out of context, I'd assume banksy or some other equally tedious graffitist was trying to make a point about corporate logos.

It's worth adding at this point that it cost substantially less to purchase the System Center licence suite that @Norphy mentions above than it did to renew vSphere for another year.

A comparison of the detailed technical specs of the two shows that the HP switch has better throughput, switching capacity, mac table size, etc. My prejudice against netgear is fairly famous in some areas but if you can't articulate why you need to spend more money on the HP system then perhaps you don't need to spend that money: If you're happy with the NetGear systems, support, etc. in general, a better question than "which is better" is "which is good enough". If you don't need the extra capacity then don't spend the extra money.

The issue is that you've got other things installed and it might cause issues with those to do the demote/promote shuffle. I can only imagine it would break SQL at the very least.