gshaw

At least MS have seen the light on this and will have it as an OS feature in Server 8... it's one of those artificial restrictions that drives me crazy as I don't want to buy a physical storage server for a feature that's been kept back to please a couple of OEM partners /rant As for storage space, have you done a Windirstat or equivalent report to find out where all the space is going? There must be a lot of multimedia in there to use up that much space so it all depends on whether it's relevant data or personal files. The other argument is not to give bundles of local storage space so staff have to put it on the VLE... in an ideal world that platform would be running via a repository system so staff can search for content but that panacea still hasn't arrived in the way I think it should exist on a technical level

I've got an unused Speech synthesizer for one at home but it doesn't fit the C64 I got from a boot sale as it was in the newer casing and the expansion slot moulding didn't fit lol

A couple of qu's... - what audience will be using the VLE, primary, secondary or FE students? - if hosting internally do you already have the server etc or will this need to be costed in? - what other features do you want integrated with the VLE i.e. email, access to network drives, LDAP etc? Moodle can work really well if set up right and choosing the right activities etc... as with any VLE the real benefits come with time and training to make it interactive rather than a resource dump...

Thanks for the link, looks to be a nicer version of a similar tool I saw on Google trailing earlier on Nice bit of tech background on why we've still got a 16-year old issue with Windows 7... some things never change!!! Explorer still limited by MAX_PATH Robocopy didn't seem to care about copying the files, everything went over OK but in the long run I've got to stop people being so verbose with folder names

While migrating our admin shared areas into a single shared drive I had a lightbulb moment and thought best to check the depth \ length of some of the folder and file names being used by staff... turns out I was in for a shock! There's some huge names that are going over the (stupid and arcane) Windows file path limit of 255 characters, found them by using this rather nifty Powershell command... cmd /c "dir \\?\E:\\ /s/b" | ? {$_.length -gt 254} The only solution in the meantime is to take the output of said nifty command and get staff to rename the offending directories and files, although I can still open them in Windows as far as I can see so far... I do love the post in this thread on Technet forums about it (search for "Why use one word where two will do" within the page!) File name too long cannot copy

Here until Wednesday, doing a file server migration at the moment (praise Robocopy!)

That's all very well in theory... when they can ship a 1TB or 2TB SSD for the same price as an HDD... ah they can't yet so there's mass storage out the window. Even the 60-80GB ones need to come right down, or will manufacturers be cynical enough to keep prices high, justifying with the line "well an HDD costs the same price now so what would you prefer?" If the SSD manufacturers could somehow get the 512GB SSD costs down (make a lot in bulk all the same size and flood the market?) then SSD-based SANs could take off, basically replacing 600GB 15k SAS drives and 7200RPM SATA in one swoop (not sure how pricing for those is at the moment, presumably through the roof?). Speed isn't a problem and I'd guess you can run a shedload of SSDs for the same energy as a shelf of HDDs (I remember someone saying at desktop level power draw is about the same but at server grade 15k level there must be an energy saving there)

Get yourself a couple of PCs or 2nd hand servers and install VMWare and Hyper-V (not at the same time lol) and get used to creating \ managing \ changing virtual machines. The MS 180-day trials are great for this and VMWare have free versions and a trial of the full vSphere product. See this for "whitebox" VMWare-compatible hardware you can have a play with... ESX / ESXi 4.0 Whitebox HCL Also Microsoft have their virtual academy which has some free training videos... Microsoft Virtual Academy - Free Microsoft Cloud Technologies Training When I look for people to fill a technician post I see if they've put the effort in to try something like this so they can come in and at least have an understanding of how the virtual environment works... doesn't cost anything to do apart from the time so reflects well on applicants if they've shown initiative and willingness to learn

All day every day and using a mix of SMART Notebook and Internet When I walk down the corridor now I look out for the Smartboard and PCs to see if they're being used and in the last couple of years the usage went up hugely. I'd like to think that's down to us providing consistent kit across all the rooms, how-to guides for all the staff and running CPD from within the IT Services team so tutors can be confident in the technology and know that there's someone there to support as and when required. Put the same strategy into play with Moodle and seems to be picking up similar results.

Was just about to make a thread about this as I'm experiencing similar delays... so far have noticed this... - two UNC shares, one with ABE enabled one without - on Windows 7 all shares open quickly - on Windows XP SP3 there's a 10-20 second delay before the share opens - if I send the UNC path in an email it opens quickly on both OS As per some of the links I've seen so far, turned off the firewall on the 2008 R2 box et voila everything quick again. The weird thing is that once you've accessed the share once it stays quick even after PC reboot so suggests something on the server side. Tried restarting the Server and Windows Firewall services (and then tried reboot) to see if that flushes anything out but the client stays quick. At first I thought it might just be a first-time connection issue but one of our users testing the share has had it happen a couple of times so maybe it takes a while to time out? This server goes live in the next week or so, would prefer to keep Firewall on but if it's causing problems I'll have to turn it off. Noticed something about disabling WebClient so may try that next. Any further input much appreciated... Edit: looks like disabling WebClient on XP seems to bring everything back to a normal speed...

Block level dedupe at OS level would be fantastic for this but I guess there's the offset between performance and just chucking more disks at the problem (see Microsoft's current stance with Exchange 2010). File level isn't that great as it only takes a single change to lose the dedupe but I'd imagine there's a lot of template Word docs, Access databases etc that all look pretty similar to each other. That said the "disk is cheap" argument isn't holding true at the present time, just hope price comes back down at some point...

Very fitting topic as I've just been tidying ours up to migrate to VM servers! Found around 200-300GB across the drives, most of which taken up by old photos that no-one even looks at now. I'm not going to migrate those and see if anyone shouts... if not they're going onto archive media and that's that Also had a big clear up of staff personal files being stored where they shouldn't be. Can't solve that problem with file screening as the same extensions are used by media files for resources. Will get an extra 1TB from merging the drives from our old DL380 G4s into one box so that gives us a bit extra for archive \ dumping ground. Easy to make a bundle of storage space but what are you doing about backups? For students cloud-based storage seems to be the way forward, if only Microsoft would add a Recycle Bin to SkyDrive it would be pretty much the ideal solution...

Same here, was having major deja-vu by the time I got to the 3rd page and question 20!

How are you publishing yours for remote access? Found RD Web Access to be far too clunky for most users with its multiple login prompts, warnings and need for full domain\username credentials HAP+ looks great for student access to files but for staff I wouldn't want potentially sensitive files to be touching their home PCs... much better to be working directly from their network drive if possible.

I dislike ATi with a passion so nVidia all the way

Some excellent comments here, well said localzuk and SteveBentley, as it stands you can pass the exams not knowing the subject that well but just a matter of playing the system and learning enough to get through. Was surprised to hear that some of the subjects do the exams at the end of each term so there's no overall summer one anymore? I feel the same way about MCSE and similar exams and I think employers have wised up to it somewhat now that the cert doesn't always mean you can solve real-world problems... completely different ball game to learning the various scenarios for the exams imo. As with the NHS, Policing and various other areas under Labour in the last 5-10 years the obsession with targets and statistics ended up with a much poorer service at the end, although the "figures" always suggest otherwise. Not getting political on it as other parties could well do the same but that method definitely hasn't worked.

I think if the physical server has plenty of grunt the single install should be OK, if you run out of disk space the distribution point is easy to move onto another box.

Are you doing imaging from the SCCM server as well? That's where your disk space will go (but even then, our 20GB XP image compressed down to around 6-7GB)

You have to be very careful when talking between people with Cisco-speak networking terms and HP-speak as the words "trunk" and "tag" don't mean the same thing between brands If you set a Trunk port on ProCurve that's link aggregation aka EtherChannel in Cisco speak If you tag ports to a VLAN (as you say for link between two switches) that's a trunk in Cisco world See Trunking Between Cisco and HP Switches « Andrew Travis's Blog

Haha I've done exactly the same before and took a few seconds to figure out why my post disappeared! Plan looks OK at the moment, I've had everything on one server and it runs fine although YMMV depending on number of clients and spec of the physical machine \ VM you run it on. If anything I'd be tempted to swap it the other way around so the distribution point doesn't hammer your SAN if there's a lot of OS and software deployment going on (again depends on resources you have available virtually for SQL \ SCCM)

Haven't seen much of this thread apart from the last couple of pages but I'd stick with the HP 5400 series (zl) for your core and built the edge up with the E-Series switches. We've got the v1910s for our iSCSI network and although they work OK the ProCurve E series seem a bit more solid and easier to manage in the long-term. Also add up the lifetime vs 3 year warranty (and subsequent care packs) to get a comparative price. As for speeds, no point having 1Gb to the desktop if it's wobbly and unmanageable.. buy good kit buy once

We have a converted cupboard, long thin room which I reckon only IT would live with but I like it If the system is quiet wander around and see how people are using your kit, get to know your users better and you might get some new ideas and get more popular in the process (not suggesting you aren't already!)

Lenovo x120e, best portable form factor for netbook size stuff Lenovo - Laptop computers - ThinkPad X120e Keyboard is fantastic, battery life was a bit iffy on the original, not sure what it's like now though

Yup that's the one! Best bet might be to either use an old server (or cheapy NAS box) for the source files then use your VM infrastructure for the distribution point (or again if there's a spare server with disk capacity this could be a good use for it) Either way split your disto point away from the main SCCM server and you get the flexibility to choose how to do it (and in the case of virtualised server mobility of where to put the datastore away from the more CPU-intensive site server database role) In this scenario Server 8's file dedupe role would be a killer feature, can't we just have it now please Microsoft

Depends if you use the physical box as a distribution point and package source. SCCM ends up duplicating images and files to deploy as it needs a set of source data and then a distribution point to send it out from...