gshaw

Even with Copyprofile sysprep still nukes various parts of the profile, Start Menu and Taskbar being one of them as far as I can tell... How To: Customize the Windows 7 Start Menu and Taskbar Using unattend.xml - Ask the Core Team - Site Home - TechNet Blogs I'm guessing the same stupidity of MS default, non-customisable settings might also apply to your classic menu as well...

Don't use the MSI, don't know how Adobe managed to break such a simple bit of technology but they did. I thought it'd be a nice painless update between versions but we had calls saying Flash wasn't working... it had uninstalled but failed on the upgrade with installax.exe errors. Running the install using the exe with silent switches worked without issue.

Don't worry about Live@Edu any more, Office 365 is the route to go down if you're putting the system in from scratch. It uses a different authentication system so no point using the old LiveID-based logins, go straight to 365 with ADFS that links straight into your AD

The spares availability is a very good point, even with standard Intel OEM stuff it'll be hard to get motherboards etc 2 years down the line. I know Stone do their long-term warranty by keeping stocks of some of the older kit and their buy-back schemes which helps.

Big manufacturers won't give you Home most of the time, Stone etc will though

I'd be disappointed if I hadn't got 3 done in an hour, let alone a day! One thing I would say though, buy the same kit that Stone etc would i.e. get the Intel OEM motherboards not some 3rd party consumer grade Asus-esque thing. Driver support and reliability needs to match whatever you'd be buying and the Intel Desktop Boards are solid When I considered self-builds (then discounted it as we don't have time now we do the VLE as well) we were looking at... - Intel Desktop Board - Core i3 2120 with stock cooler - 4GB RAM (so cheap at the moment you might as well have it) - 64GB Crucial M4 SSD - Lite On DVD-RW - case was an issue so didn't decide on one - Corsair standard PSU - Logitech basic keyboard \ mouse bundle - Windows 7 Home Premium OEM (upgrade to Enterprise via EES) The bit that will hit you is the Windows 7 licensing, though that said just found this on Scan... http://www.scan.co.uk/products/microsoft-windows-7-home-premium-64-bit-sp1-operating-system-single-oem Couldn't find it all from one supplier but added up to about £350, £50 saving over what I've been quoted for a similar machine without the SSD. Not quite enough saving there to make it worthwhile for us but the SSD bit still grates on me...

Veeam is more CPU heavy than RAM, 2-4GB will do. Running VMs from backup is quite IO heavy so I'd go for a set of local SATA drives

I went round and round in my head about the best method of deployment for Veeam... so much so it nearly sent me crazy! Eventually it came down to this... - in the event of a major storage failure having my Veeam VM in the same place = no restore - backups in theory go slower as you hammer the same storage, CPU and network you're backing up (Veeam needs a fair bit of grunt for the de-dupe etc) - you can't take advaantage of some of the advanced Veeam features without a physical server (not sure how this applies in v5) We now have a dedicated DL180 G6 single quad core CPU server for Veeam and backup the backups to tape once a week as an offline archive. Btw I'd go Veeaam over DPM as the ability to run servers direct from backups is awesome and a create way to test if said backups actually work

Stone and Viglen cases are Chenbro OEM I think... Chenbro Micom Co., Ltd. Not sure if you could find a supplier who could get them for you?

Just bought one Only got it in virtual wire mode for now but already I can see exactly what protocols are being used and how much of it. I can then allow, block or restrict speed based on the application, source network, user group etc. There's cheaper products out there but couldn't get the same feature set and richness of policy as the Palo provides

Was looking at doing an MCTS course just to get the MS logo but not at the moment... got enough to worry about with Summer projects without adding piles of study to the list. Best reserved for when the days are dark and cold

No worries, good to have views on both products and all the available options Btw does your DL180 scream like a banshee the whole time it's on? Was really disappointed at how poor the fan control is on ours... HP didn't seem too bothered about providing a firmware fix for it at the time (mid 2011). Seems to be related to the PCI-e riser card but they give the same "we know, we don't care" response to everyone

Just bought a Palo, not cheap in comparison to some others but you get so much control and visibility I'd say it's worth it

1) not with VDI in a box now it's a grid that uses DAS... always their main selling point. Even with your DL180 example that's still what, 4-5k? Add that to two decent spec servers and you're not far off 10k just to get started. That's the cost of 30 PCs before you've even put the software and thin clients in... ouch 2) the disks aren't for storage but for pure speed, I remember a presentation showing you need about 20-30 IOPS per VDI machine you deploy... a 15k SAS disk can only do 180 (if you're talking random reads \ writes) so to get 30 odd machines provisioning at once you suddenly need a fair few of them in there. At current prices "disks is cheap" doesn't apply anymore and that's where I see part of the problem from a cost perspective... not to mention the power used for them. Of course 1 SSD is up in the thousands of IOPS so with those the problem goes away in an instant

Very interesting thread, VDI really does seem to split opinion (although granted a lot of the hype is coming from the vendors selling it!) I've been watching it as a technology for about 3 years now and analysing when the point will arrive that it hits that sweet spot of price \ performance \ features that makes it the accepted choice in the same way server virtualisation is these days. Problems I've seen thus far... 1) Until recently VDI = SAN = costly. I can't see the point of taking the cost of infrastructure you can buy in stages (desktops) then spending the same \ more to move it to a huge initial cost by putting it in the server room. 2) Number of disks... as with all of these virtualisation-esque solutions IOPS are king... doesn't give great VFM if you then have to stack 20 odd SAS 15k disks to get enough grunt to provision 30 desktops on demand. Yes there's kludges around "boot storms" but it's not ideal. Replacing (cheap) SATA local PC disks with (expensive) SAS 15ks seems a bit pointless... affordable SSDs for this will be when we see the big shift imo. 3) Video performance... getting better with HDX, PCoIP etc but still seemingly not 100% 4) Licensing... not so much of a problem if you have EES (and therefore Software Assurance)... then there's the cost of the VDI software itself Possible benefits if VDI done right... 1) No "image creep"... every machine reprovisions every time so you never get issues with viruses, Windows Update etc 2) Easy updates... new version of Office? Install on the Gold image and it's done 3) Smaller desk footprint... I really like the look of the AXEL Zero Clients, certainly frees up some space 4) Remote access... I do like the idea of the exact desktop being able to be accessed from home as opposed to a "nearly the same" Terminal Server... saying that I think the "Windows on an iPad" idea rather gimmicky and not that much of a benefit in the real world How can VDI get there? 1) Easily expandable, pay-as-you-grow model... VDI in a box with the grid architecture looks a much better choice... start with 2 servers and scale up... lower initial costs 2) Affordable server SSDs... one of those will take the place of 20 odd HDDs but the prices need to come down...

According to the ICC document I've just read it seems we'll be OK with a cookies policy as ours fall into either category 1 (functional cookies i.e. site won't work without them for Moodle) or category 2 (Google Analytics)

To be completely paranoid take the battery out so there's no possibility of it overheating... if it's knackered you don't lose anything feature-wise...

Yup agree, IT teams can't only sit on the technical side these days. You need to have an appreciation of how the tech is being used in classes and the current and future direction of learning generally e.g. understanding why e-ILPs and e-Portfolios are important or how changes to funding might affect the courses and resources you use. As for projects... middle of the year is our quieter time... usually when we're speccing up what we need from our end-of-year budgets. We then go out and buy it now we have the following for summer... - Windows 7 upgrade, new mandatory profile setup etc for all teaching machines - swap machines around so fastest units are in key areas, perform yearly checks \ repairs on Smartboard & projector setups - additional suite of workstations, currently choosing between standard PCs or going down the VDI route - configure and test our new Ruckus WLAN for RADIUS & Guest Access - configure Palo Alto firewall and set up VLANs for Guest Access etc - customise theme, test additional plugins and update training materials for Moodle 2.2 upgrade - create POC Joomla site \ layout for SLT to decide if to move website away from our current all-in-one Moodle portal Also during this time - test Office 365 and decide where it fits with our network - report on use of printers and move devices around based on usage and requirements... some replaced with MFPs - tidy up server room and clear out old kit from server rack so it's nice and neat Busy summer ahead!

That's interesting, very similar feature sets between XD and the Kaviza product in that case... always thought the main difference was the lack of shared storage requirement. How does XD do it with DAS?

It's worth looking at VDI-in-a-box before you go down the XenDesktop route... it's now part of Citrix but doesn't need SAN storage so could work out considerably cheaper. Check out jamesfed's VDI open day thread, could be just what you need

Problem is users rebooting the PC halfway through setup, had that a few times even with the notification bar showing! Also Office 2007 sometimes acts silly when uninstalling and needs the Fixit \ Offscrub tool to clean it completely...

This makes little sense when the price from online retailers is now in what I'd consider "cheap" territory... if they're selling for £50 for a 64MB M4 with associated warehouse, delivery etc costs someone is making a nice profit from the manufacturers \ supply chain to be charging £75+ for the same unit in larger quantities. The other big PC cost increase is Microsoft's dirty trick with Windows 7 OEM licensing... whack another £20-30 per unit on for 7 Home Premium instead of Vista Home Basic... luckily we got the bulk of our machines in before the licensing change, which along with the HDD costs now looks a very wise move I guess this is why I'm an IT geek rather than a City exec... I want the technology to move forward and hate seeing profiteering, which sadly is the name of the game in the business world...

See this irritates me, rather than give the option to search for everything in there MS prefers to tell me how to use my computer (seemingly like a bad ripoff of an iPad thus far)... might only be 10% of the search but having to use another (rather bizarre) key combo to get to it annoys me 90% more than it did in 7.

Yup same here... personally I'd expect some sort of similar access to the Office 365 Sharepoint libraries but that would be too simple eh

Yup came through via email as part of a SkyDrive update... as mentioned above a real shame that SkyDrive gets wiped out just as the APIs etc finally get released so we can integrate it into other services Saw the My Files section on Office 365 in a demo the other day... didn't look the friendliest thing in the world I have to admit. Not sure if it was because the demo was on with an admin account but there's a lot of links and buttons on the Sharepoint feature, have a feeling it might look a bit overwhelming for some users... Currently feeling a little bit uncertain with Office 365... during the demo the words website and VLE were mentioned but the features I saw couldn't replace either... need to find where it sits neatly amongst other platforms we already have I think.