CAWJames

Thanks I will test both sides of the coin after hearing that. How many sessions can you run on a physical host? or how many per session host and how many session hosts per physical before you see performance problems?

Yes the majority of ours are the office worker type, but we then add in the SfB with video, plus we have an Planet eStream setup, and not to mention youtube, we decided to look at individual VM's with GRID cards, we have a healthy budget, but with this kind of thing, budgets are blown easily! I am hopefully trying to acquire a PoC server with more RAM, cores and IOPS(SSD based RAID10) than I can shake a stick at to do some testing. UX is key, and if I can't provide that, the budget goes on new client side hardware.

The master plan is to give VM's to the staff and session based to the students. Our only sticking point is Skype for Business, so we are going to start testing soon with the VDI plugin, but we might find its a no go without Grid cards and servers that can run small countries!

Fair enough I agree big cost to purchase mind-wobbling servers to run all the VM's against just session based servers serving multiple desktops. We are thinking of running all our desktops on VM based, and use our old physical computers as thin clients, so full VDI. I was hoping you weren't going to stick a spanner in my wheels with an unknown cost I hadn't thought about!! Thanks James

Which part of the VDI setup do you find costly out of interest, we are weighing up our options at the moment. Thanks James

Tefters, are you doing a session based setup or VM based? Any reason why you aren't using Windows 10 if the latter?

I used this Deploying Windows 10 Virtual Desktop Infrastructure on Windows Server 2016 (Technical Preview) as a basis for installing, got StartSSL to issue me a cert, and away

Thats about it! Perks for not going free! In the real world, DC is very expensive, so sometimes it is cheaper to stack with each std licence providing 2 virtuals - - - Updated - - - http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/d/4/3d42bdc2-6725-4b29-b75a-a5b04179958b/windowsserver2012virtualtech_vlbrief.pdf See section marked "Licensing of Running Instances of the Software"

Yep, if your using the free host, then it's 1 licence per VM needed

You can stack licenses, that's what MS tell you to do, until you hit a price point that warrants DC so 2 standard is 4 VM's plus host with only hyper-v role, or 3 VM's and a host doing Hyper-V and other nefarious deeds

I don't mean a controller in the cloud they do a mini plug in stick set up to be a server and they call it a cloud key! No subs

If you use the main physical hardware for anything other than Hyper-V role, then it takes the second licence, meaning in that scenario you can only have 1 VM

That's what I usually do, but someone published the kmsadd address, so I thought that might be easier, never thought about quicker... Any idea what the number is?

yes then! AlphaSSL cert

my 10 LTSB's and 2016 test servers aren't activating, awaiting the key...who's silly idea was it to only publish MAK's and make KMS request only, I thought one of the big fanfare reasons KMS was bought in was to combat MAK piracy

Maybe all related to the revocation of AlphaSSL/GlobalSign certs today?

All sounds very good plus spend £3-4k on 30-40 Unifi or £30k on other solutions, hmmm I wonder! Think I might get some in to test, thanks all

Excellent[cue Mr Burns hand wringing] I have full coverage at home with the original unifi kit, even down the field with the cat 5 and armoured power cable I ran down the hedge to the polytunnel!! I can google anywhere! How do they handle load? Do you see any problems when a whole raft of students descend on a point? or are you pretty well blanketed with multiple AP to handle it? Our other vendor N's start to chug over 25 ish connections. Thanks James

Morning fellow learned persons Are the Unifi AC access points still a good budget choice for WiFi? the price point compared to the big boys is still quite wide, so looking at them for an option. Cloud key at main site and a 10 pack per centre. I run the original N flying saucers at home, one in the house, one in the garage and another in the polytunnel with the server installed on my garage debian server, and its excellent, so I hope the AC is a shift further on. Did they ever sort the auto passing off of clients to other AP's?(I think this is part of the AC protocol anyway, but they may have done something else with it, as I know they were working on it before the AC's came along) Any anecdotal evidence so I can add it to my list? Thanks James

Just spun up a quick 2 server 2016 RDS system with Windows 10 LTSB VM's, and it is much faster, quick load times of the VM, Youtube actually runs "smoothly" in a chrome window. And this is only running on a 2012R2 Hyper-V cluster on a traditional disk SAN, not dedicated hardware. Can't wait to get a server filled with SSD and running 2016 server for Hyper-V. Going to be Epic

My new setup is showing 2016 at the bottom right in RDWeb Just customizing it now for UPN/email address login and bing wallpaper background

Its still a minefield, but a lot easier with EES. some are licenced by FTE(number of staff members) while others are per licence. So server, sql, exchange are per licence, while things like RDS licences, desktop bundles are FTE

Server licences are seperate, but cheap. If the student desktops are institution owned, you are covered by the EES. We image hundreds of staff and student PC's with Windows 7 Enterprise, and we will upgrade to 10 Edu when ready.

In that case, this is how it works... You buy a desktop bundle for each full time staff member, in our case 115 x. This then entitles you to install any windows and office on any PC, as long as it has an OEM licence on it and the institution owns it. And you can do as many as you like, thousands of device if you so wish!

Do you have OVS-ES? ie the "Schools agreement" or "EES"