gshaw

To me the numbers don't stack up for 8 machines... even at £400 per desktop you'd still be coming in less. Granted if you get 60 machines out of it the numbers become a lot nicer. If you did go up to 60 would you put a second server in? That's a lot of eggs (users) in one basket (server) if something goes wobbly...

Are these server-grade SSDs you're putting in there? Every time I get a sales call regarding VDI I always maintain that the Kaviza model + SSDs is what I'm waiting for. Really can't see how paying out for a SAN + bundles of fast server hard drives is in any way efficient but pay-as-you-grow and super fast SSD provisioning... now I'm listening Do you still need Kaviza-specific thin clients or can you use more generic ones now it supports HDX natively? I reckon this could be a good solution for our back office desktops so keeping a very close eye on the technology as it matures...

Add Corsair to that list as well

Always an interesting debate this! I'm in the "didn't go" camp, having worked for a year after A-Levels I felt like I was doing something of value in work rather than feeling completely pointless while in 6th form. Got the grades (more A's than you could shake a stick at) and actually went to Queen Mary for about 4 days on a Masters course for Electronic Engineering but never felt like it was what I wanted to do tbh. At the time I was told how I'd get nowhere and that you could only get jobs with a Degree etc etc... looking back in hindsight now it seems I made the right call as there's graduates than you can shake a stick at now and many with good degrees from good Unis struggling in the jobs market. Personally I value the experience and professional networking I've been able to do in that time, also added a few "soft skill" certs like ITIL that can only help as time goes on. Granted it does mean certain careers are closed off but they're mostly ones I wouldn't want to do anyway or places that I wouldn't want to work at (if a company is elitist enough to assume that only graduates can have the skills regardless of what area the degree is in then I wouldn't want to work there anyway) Also depends if you don't mind the debt... some may say as far as loans go it's a good one but starting out your working life with a £10k+ millstone around your neck isn't the way I wanted to go... personal choice at the end of the day. One thing you will probably miss out on is the social aspect with other young people, especially if you go into a career in IT

I've always wanted to play with App-V (from back when it was called Softgrid) but never had enough time or spare servers to mess around with. What do you use it for at your place? Could be handy for making roaming copies of Photoshop and Lightroom although they're quite hefty apps to virtualise. I'm guessing you have MDOP on your EES to get App-V? UE-V sounds very interesting, as noted in the article only 10 years late

In the long run best bet would be to sync your DCs with an NTP source then everything will be fully accurate as the clients sync with the PDC

Just give DHCP its own VM Used to have it split across two DHCP servers but seems like after going virtual most people just put it on one VM As for DC backups... we use Veeam. The SureBackup feature is handy as you can spool up your entire network from the backup files to check everything works as expected if you needed to restore from them... very funky!

So basically it's now got (or getting) a desktop, 3D effects with a 4 letter name beg and offline files support (?) Even the 3D effects have a similar name (Aura, Aero hmmm!) Sounds a bit like another OS I know

Definitely looks pretty but slightly pointless seeing as you're the only person seeing them? Dymo tape is all you need

My speed went down to around 1Mb last night just by watching ITV online for the Chelsea match and downloading a couple of Linux LiveCDs...

A quick update... it seems that if you leave entries in the recent programs list when preparing the mandatory profile it overrides the GPO trying to clear the list. Solution: clear everything before creating the mandatory profile (I did this by default when preparing XP images and even more reason to do it now) The only other issue I'm getting is if the same user logs back in with the mandatory profile I'm getting (2) at the end of the pinned items... need to investigate that one a bit further...

And this is why Internet TV and download-only consoles will have trouble... ISPs holding back technology... nothing changes

Yup same, got all excited by the Wordpress app but it was absolutely useless... my most used tile is for Google Chrome and that's about it. Found another annoying quirk yesterday... while trying to drag a scrollbar in Chrome that was near the bottom the charms bar decided to jump in front of it instead. Also find the light grey scrollbars in Metro apps (e.g. Windows Store) hard to see and not all of them use the mouse wheel to scroll across instead. Does boot nice and quickly on my x100e with an SSD now though

Having spent weeks looking at these recently... - Endian... roll your own server open-source product with a nice feature list but have to pay if you want support - TMG... cheap on EES but quite limited (and runs on Windows, which is enough to make me say no straight away) - Smoothwall... solid firewall & quality content filtering but no next-gen app level detection - Fortigate... solid firewall, some basic app level filtering but only at a block \ allow level - Sonicwall... promise a lot, seems to be love\hate with customers if it does what it says on the tin. Dell takeover muddies the waters - Watchguard... lots of features, does app-level but I didn't like the interface and having web filtering on a separate box (couldn't get a definitive answer from Watchguard on this as someone said on here it's all integrated now? They couldn't provide any education case studies either which didn't impress me) - Palo Alto... the Audi \ BMW of firewalls... fantastic granularity, bandwidth control and reporting but you pay for the privilege In the end we forked out for the Palo as if we don't control the student wireless our bandwidth will disappear the moment we turn it on. On the other hand I want to let genuine student web traffic through at full speed so being able to control bandwidth per app and see exactly what's going on is worth the £££ if you can get it. In these days of port 80 tunneling and web services I personally think app-level is a must-have. Quick tip: if you're on EES buy Enterprise CALS and use Forefront Online Protection for Exchange for anti-spam filtering... save your bandwidth by doing it in the cloud and your monies by saving on firewall licenses

Now they just need to do the couple of UI tweaks I want, a theming engine and proper GPO control of the Metro Start screen and we might be getting somewhere

Words of a brave man taking on a new Server OS on initial release

Office 365 looks a lot better from an integration point of view... the only piece of the puzzle that needs doing better is Moodle (but MS must know my thoughts on this by now as I've been banging on about it for 2-3 years )

I'd spend a couple of weeks trying to figure out the foibles and if there's any hidden reasons for the setup before changing anything. Are the child domains for staff \ students? Always interested in various ideas with 2 domains \ subdomains \ trusts but in the end 1 seems to be the path of least resistance. So much stuff needs to be linked up these days splitting across multiple domains just makes life more hassle than it's worth... The fresh start sounds like a plan, that way you know what you've done (and a good excuse to get the migration to 2008 R2 \ Windows 7 done) 14 servers... time for virtualisation as well?

Without wanting to sound too crazy it's only a fine line these days between what's actually a crime and when your opinions are seen being just as bad. The worry with snooping like this is eventually that free speech and thought get stamped down on if you dare to disagree with the powers that be...

Not sure if everyone has this sorted already but in case it's useful here's how we've sorted out a clean, managed Start Menu and Taskbar without the junk sysprep leaves behind in the Default Profile How to… get a perfect Windows 7 managed Start Menu and Taskbar « gshaw0 Getting happy with our Windows 7 setup now... almost at the same level of consistency as our XP image, just need to get rid of the Public locations within Libraries and I'll be satisfied.

The charms need to activate quicker when using the mouse (feels like you have to hold on half a second too long at the moment) and after installing MS need to force a quick-start wizard to tell users where everything is (as most of the new UI features are less than intuitive) A lot of it depends on how much companies are willing to take up Metro rather than Win32 for new versions of their apps. On a tablet Windows 8 feels pretty good but on any other device you end up back at the standard desktop most of the time anyway. I can see Metro apps being hard to control as well as there's so much flexibility in the design framework every one is likely to be different... good for consumer stuff where it's design-oriented but not for corporate use who want a locked down environment. On the other hand maybe the aim is to have consumer-esque work environments and BYOD but is everyone ready for it right now... that's the gamble MS seem to be taking...

Office 365 will give you better control than Live@Edu so would recommend you start on the new platform if you go down the MS route. FIM and ADFS will be easier to manage than LiveIDs once set up. Also factor in Lync and Sharepoint on 365 and it's a good offering, only thing Google have the edge for my needs is Moodle integration via the respository function... how I could do with that with Live@Edu / 365!

In a bid to become Apple Microsoft could end up alienating the customers that were on their side originally. Can see a lot of developers sticking with Win32 for a while yet. As for the preview apps, yup many were pointless... like the WordPress one that only lets you view blogs and not update your own one! Could the Store be Windows Logo Certification mk2

Check owner on the files as well (I'm guessing this is a locked down desktop / Start Menu if it's read only?)

SCCM for us