gshaw

For IT use... standard RRAS VPN. Funny enough was going to ask about remote working... thought RDS Web Access was perfect for this but from what I see the end-user experience is somewhat lacking... - staff sign into RD Web Access, had to edit the login page to put the domain name in front... bearable - RemoteApps work fine, click and launch... great (although the Connect box is annoying but not removable without a GPO applied... not going to happen on a users' personal PC!) - connect to an actual Remote Desktop session by clicking the optional icon... awful... asks for credentials again that have to be entered in DOMAIN\USERNAME format (at least on 7 it fills it in for you but XP just gives a blank box) Very frustrating as the idea is great but Microsoft seem to have missed the point of a Remote Access solution being for computers that aren't under corporate control!

You could use DPM but it won't give you full VM-level recovery unless you use Hyper-V. Personally once I go virtual I'd want to be able to recover all my virtual machines for DR so whether you go VMWare \ Veeam or Hyper-V \ DPM (or also Hyper-V \ Veeam) it's a better strategy than just having file-level backups imo. Snapshots on the SAN will need to be application-consistent for VM snaps to be of any use, depends on your SAN and features licensing... Windows Datacenter licensing is awesome, definitely one of Microsoft's best offers @Domino... 60 CPUs wow, how big is your site for that little lot... 30 dual CPU VM host servers?

Don't think the supplier will be an MS Partner for very long once they hear about this At the very least (until you get everything sorted out) as for your agreement number, say you need it for licensing records then go and register on the licensing portal and all your keys will be on there. If they refuse to give the details get on the phone to Microsoft and get them to kick some backside!

Sleeping thread resurrection time! Had a slight change of plan with this after some of our teams were restructured, just moving our shared areas for now as the user folders need more work to sort them out for Windows 7. I'm now looking at using this command first to seed the initial copy of the data, one batch file per shared folder to be copied... robocopy "D:\Source Folder" "\\newfileserver\d$\TEMPAREA\Source Folder" /E /V /ZB /R:0 /W:0 /TEE /COPYALL /LOG:Source_Folder.log Then when coming to the migration unshare the source folder (i.e. no more changes possible), run this... robocopy "D:\Source Folder" "\\newfileserver\d$\TEMPAREA\Source Folder" /MIR /V /ZB /R:0 /W:0 /TEE /COPYALL /LOG+:Source_Folder_MIRROR.log After which point I then move the transferred files from TEMPAREA to their new home (and also replace all the copied permissions with those of the new folder they live in due to merging multiple folders into one for some areas) Did a test with our IT shared area and it copied everything over, MIR removed deleted files and added new ones... so far so good... have I missed anything? (as you can tell this process makes me very paranoid being that it only gets moved once every 5-6 years!)

I'm building our replacement VM file server at the moment and having a think about a better permissions system than what we have now, would be interested to see some input on the idea I've had based around these (rather good) articles... The Golden Rules of Permissions Administration - NetworkAdminKB.com Axioms of Permissions Administration - NetworkAdminKB.com The idea is to have each area's files as a secured folder under a common root (rather than 1 share per area as we've had in the past) so thinking along the lines of... Sharedfolder (shared) Security permissions... SYSTEM, local administrators, administrators = Full Control (apply to all subfolders \ files) Authenticated Users (or for more paranoia our All Staff group) = Read (this folder only) Logic being they can Read to see the list of folders (or not if I turn ABE on ) but not access them unless explicit permissions are granted... which leads to the next bit... Under this top root I have various folders, let's call them Red, Green and Blue. Usually I'd just think to turn off inheritance, copy the common permissions (for SYSTEM etc) then assign a group called Red with Full Control. According to that article I may be better off going for an additional tier of folder resource groups and adding the User groups to that instead. Don't think we have a need for Read Only folder access but seems more flexible in the future. Then for the migration I'm aiming to use Robocopy to shift the files from the old server, move them into place (some folders merging so will need a bit of manual tidying) then replacing old permissions on the files with those of the new container folder. Any input on what works well for you as always appreciated Edit: from testing I've found that users can delete the subfolders if they have Modify rights on it, which would be expected (permission set to this folder, subfolders and files). If I change that to subfolders and files only I lose access to the subfolder which means I can't in there to view any files... not much use either! Solution seems to be setting an additional permission to Deny Delete, Change Atrributes etc which leaves me with what I want... - everyone can view the listing of subfolders under the root - certain groups can then access the subfolders assigned via group membership (but not modify the subfolder itself) - those certain groups can create \ delete files and folders as much as they like Not sure if there's a more elegant way but doesn't seem to be as the explicit Allow on the subfolder overrides any inherited Deny from above... gotta love permissions

Wish I would've known about you a few years back, managed to save some kit (including a rather funky Cub IR touchscreen) but I've seen a couple go that I couldn't find space for

Probably my favourite computer along with the Acorn RISC PC BBC News - The BBC Microcomputer and me, 30 years down the line http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/57052000/jpg/_57052571_bbcmicro.jpg

Or make a Facebook profile for each server and tag them all in a group server party gallery (and no that wasn't meant to be a serious suggestion in case anyone has any doubt!) Tbh if they're standard HP or Dell severs I'd just build a Visio diagram of everything as all the labelling and information fields are built in... get all your shapes from here... http://www.visiocafe.com/ If feeling really OCD you could even try and draw in the connections from the NICs (although it tends to get very messy very quickly!)

We did the same... each XL module only had the 4 ports as you mentioned so it worked out cheaper to gte a 5406zl with a 24-port SFP module than to try and get anywhere near with the XL modules

I used this when ours were running slowly (although depends on your OS, are you on XP or Vista \ 7?) Debugging Windows Logon and Group Policy Processing - Agile IT Blog For 7... http://techibee.com/group-policies/enable-group-policy-debugging-on-windows-7/191 Found a 20 second lag from our Kaspersky Network Agent which had a known workaround... you should be able to do something similar and see if it's getting stuck on a startup program, driver, folder \ profile redirection etc...

Hardly ground breaking... I'd imagine there's a lot of people out there with a lot more than 1TB worth of files

That is one very angry technician! Just about to move ours to 2008 R2 this week, only taken this long due to not having driver support on our old servers... no such problems with VMWare Although there's not a technical reason for having older DCs I prefer to have my server and desktop OS in step so everything is running at the same generation of software... slightly OCD perhaps but works for me

Depending on your SAN the controllers load balance and failover in different ways... our VNXe is active-active so I assign the datastores alternately between controllers... when we did a shutdown recently it failed over seamlessly to the other controller and back again. Out of that list the only part I don't have is a 2nd SAN (or 2nd building to house it in actually ) Veeam does help there though as I then have a secondary copy of all the VMs that can run directly from backup so that helps. The only thing I'm not entirely convinced about on SANs is using file shares on them natively. When we got the VNXe I was quite excited by that feature as I never wanted to see a Windows file server ever again but unless you use the SAN replication backup becomes more trouble than it's worth so going to just stick with Windows VMs and Veeam as per the rest of the servers. Read an interesting point on PC Pro saying don't virtualise file servers but if the storage is on the SAN it makes little sense not to virtualise and take advantage of multiple host failover and not be reliant on physical server hardware for that role?

Either Computer Aid if the kit is usable and in working order or Stone (although they charge now if the PCs are working order you might get back enough £££ to cover the disposal) Both options will securely wipe the HDDs and give you a certificate of disposal.

You need a better firewall \ filter for BYOD really, so much stuff can tunnel through 80 \ 443 now an application-aware firewall is a must imo...

Physical DC is handy but not essential, are any of your old servers still in warranty \ worth keeping? Could re-use one of those. We've got HP managed ProCurve switches all over, still 100Mb to desktop with 1Gb fiber link back per switch (usually 24 ports). We have our VMWare set up to use tagged VLANs so we can define network membership at the VM level (admin or teaching on separate networks) If you can stretch to a 3rd host it's better for redundancy as if one should go down you're not running at 100% utilisation on the existing host. Comes down to money though. Desktops we used to have on a 3yr cycle but the last lot went to 5 years and since Core2Duo came out performance is still good. Our Stone kit has 5yr warranty so makes sense to align the replacement cycle to that. Haven't virtualised desktops yet as the numbers don't add up financially and you'll most likely need additional servers for VDI on top of the ones you purchase to run your servers, unless you go for something like Kaviza that uses DAS you'll also need more disks on your SAN as VDI hammers it.

Sunday during the day is looking best for me... gshaw aka gshaw0

Won't go far wrong with any of those or the Netapp suggested below, might cost a bit more though depending on how much educational discount you can squeeze out of them

Personally I'd only go for a SAN from one of the more established brands just from a long-term support perspective, others may disagree

Good news, finally a use for the EU

It's a good one to do if you can, especially in a separate building, covers your DR very nicely

Ahh fair do's, think I remember it now from when we looked at the FAS series (luckily you haven't got the 2020 which had some awful feedback due to the slow CPU) A 2nd SAN... can I have your budget please

Yup we have Veeam as well, felt weird moving after so many years of Backup Exec but the difference in price (Veeam much much lower) and features (Veeam much more) meant it was a no-brainer. @RTFM, your setup sounds ideal for Veeam as your 4th host could run a basic VMWare license then use Veeam Replication to run a standby copy of the VMs for DR purposes. Wish I could do that here but I haven't got anywhere to put another server outside of the server room

Nice, hope he appreciates it Where did you find out about all this stuff, have seen a few websites but they tend to contradict each other and vets don't seem to know a lot about them either!

How do you stop a tortoise hibernating? Ours went in a bit early this year due to that cold snap we had a while back, hope he'#s gonna be OK I order pretty much everything online, can't be doing with crowded shops or looking for stuff on shelves when I can do it from the comp Most mundane stuff has to be the Tesco order every week, that site annoys me. Next place is maybe some Velcro but even that was exciting as I wanted it to hold the amps down in my boot install