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1 NM (me) and 0.5 IT tech, both of us TTO. About 660 students, 80 staff, 450 devices.

Oh yes I'm quite used to Dell's warranty. In my experience they're quite good when you're paying them a lot of money though. @simongrahamuk That's interesting as I have never heard much good about it before.

We're sticking with SIMS @timbo343 I wouldn't want to use anything else and our Data Manager doesn't want to either ha!

Using the VRTX, I wouldn't be replicating. I would be using the shared storage and yes there is the chance that the chassis can fail but I have reviews from users who've had them nearly 2 years without a hitch. Besides, that's what a 4 hour response warranty is for.

Hi all I'm hoping someone on here can help me. I know people have issues with the replication failing and because of this I don't am wanting to put in a shared resource system (Dell VRTX), however that costs more and I need some decent evidence to back my plan up. I'm in need of someone who is using 2 or more Windows servers running Hyper-V using replication who is willing to write me an honest review, including any issues they have with it, that I can include as part of my plan. We will be replacing the entire server system rather than just adding new ones to an existing system and whatever I end up putting in will be Server 2016 and Hyper-V. Thanks in advance! Nicki

The Dell VRTX uses a cluster so in a sense, yes.

Hi all I'm hoping someone on here can help me. I know people have issues with the replication failing and because of this I don't am wanting to put in a shared resource system (Dell VRTX), however that costs more and I need some decent evidence to back my plan up. I'm in need of someone who is using 2 or more Windows servers running Hyper-V using replication who is willing to write me an honest review, including any issues they have with it, that I can include as part of my plan. We will be replacing the entire server system rather than just adding new ones to an existing system and whatever I end up putting in will be Server 2016 and Hyper-V. Thanks in advance! Nicki

@Linfit and @DaveAshworth - Thank you both fro the information. If I message you my email address, would you both be happy to give a review of the VRTX? Our Business Manager would like to hear a view from someone who currently uses the VRTX as their main school system.

So your physical dc is there in case the all the hosts go down in the cabinet for whatever reason? If that is the case would all your users still be able to login when only that DC was there? Ours wouldn't as their profiles are stored on the file server so nothing would work even if they managed to login.

If I did have one I would just reuse one of our current servers as the physical dc and keep some spares for it but it would have to be in the same room as the VRTX. It wouldn't be much use if the VRTX went down anyway as noone can login without the file server being accessible. I'm struggling to find a reason to need it, short of being told I have to have one by the company who may need to support it at some point.

Ok so I won't worry about the shared storage going off. The only other thing I keep being told is that I should a physical dc in case anything screws up with shared storage and I need a dc to get things back online. Is this really necessary, do you guys have one?

So do you shut the chassis down as well or just the blades? That's the only thing I haven't been able to work out yet, there doesn't seem to be a way to nicely shut the chassis down and then get it to come back on again when the power is restored.

Thanks for this. Our air-con can barely cope at the minute too. How do you have UPS's connected up to the VRTX or do you not bother?

I don't see why it couldn't replace them really as it can have 4 blade servers, each of which can be very powerful. We'll only have 2 in a cluster with 13/14 virtual servers stored on a LUN on the shared storage so there's no need to replicate the virtual servers. Currently we have 9 physical servers that are approx 8 years old, 2 of which have virtual servers on (3 in total).

Well I've been here less that 2 months so far but I think we have approx 660 students, 80 staff and 450 pc's.

Don't worry about it. I was hoping someone on here might have one and could at least tell me how theirs is set up.

The Hyper-V virtual servers will happily shutdown (or at least pause) nicely as part of the host shutting down. My issue is the VRTX chassis itself which has all the shared storage in, that doesn't appear to have any way of telling it to turn off so it would just crash it when the UPS ran out of battery. I did find one person online who said that as there's nothing accessing the storage it shouldn't matter it is gets crashed like that.

Hi all I'm after a bit of advice from anyone who currently has a VRTX. I'm looking at getting one which will be 2 blades running Windows Hyper-V hosts and several virtual servers, basically the entire school network. My plan is to put 2 APC UPS's in the rack with it and have each connected by USB to one of the hosts and then they will run the shut down sequence in case of a power failure. All this is simple enough but there doesn't seem to be a way to shut down the VRTX chassis nicely from a sequence. My question is, how does anyone who owns a VRTX do it? Thanks in advance Nicki

2nd April 2004 for ours ... I was still in secondary school! We've still got a 2003 server running though.

Hi all I have just been asked if we can remove the "middle finger" emoji from the iPads in school as it isn't appropriate. Now I understand from a bit of searching that the only way to do this is to remove the built in emoji keyboard and install a new one. My question is, has anyone done this yet and if so what keyboard have they used to replace it with? Thanks in advance!