2 was made by a different company and I hated it. Infinite is one of the best games I have ever played! Take your time and take in the scenery and characters. Already have a little crush on Elizabeth!
I think what you are looking for is a leasing scheme. Apple don't do it directly but they have a number of partners that do. We got 1200 iPads at £20 a month for two years then £50 final payment. This included insurance, apple care, £25 iTunes Credit and Case.
Dont use ESXi. Use Hyper-V, installed simply on top of the 2008 machine. It will do everything you need, its completely free and has advanced features such as snapshots
I have £30 a month Sky Fibre Unlimited Pro. 89mbps down/20 mbps up on an average day. Often download from usenet, watch NFL HD stream and play online game at the same time
I would be very wary of a secondary school that at present has no IT technician. You may be walking into a giant mess. However any experience is good experience. See if they have an old server that is mothballed in a cupboard somewhere. Get it out and put Server 2008 R2 on it, break it, fix it, break it some more. Just experiment as much as possible, but not on your live environment. All is good for your CV.
Yes, it is sooo easy to get answers out of a hysterical and terrified three year old whose mother is motionless on the floor. They did well to get what information they did.
Workgroup Manager works fine on 10.7 Server. As does all the server Admin tools. The Server.app is crap to be honest. Creating or modifying a sharepoint is a crap shoot.
We were in a similar situation when we moved into our BSF school four years ago. Four years later CC4 still performs as poorly as you describe. Get used to watching the "Please Wait" screen for hours and hours.
Buy a copy of Lion via the app store. Image and restore. Make sure you buy enough copies of the Mountain Lion VL when it comes out and you will be fine. We run Snow Leopard on Lion generation iMacs and Apple Ok'd it.
The comment earlier about there is no way to track what users do on iPads is not true. We are using smoothwall and doing IP auth for students and U&P auth via the smoothwall app for guests.