Jollity

I have a few more questions. (Surprise!) Do people tend to use the same backup solution for the host machine system partition as for the virtual machines? If Veeam is for virtual machines only then maybe not. Or is the host machine configuration minimal enough that it can just be recreated? I am guessing that might be true for VMWare, but not for Hyper-V. Similarly do you backup the backup server system partition? (Who backs up the backers up?!) A fellow admin I was talking to yesterday, said that he keeps some roles (including DC) on the host system, and puts others, like Exchange, in Hyper-V virtual machines. My understanding would be that it would better practice to keep every other role off the hosts for security reasons. Is that correct? Are there other reasons for not doing it? Edit: He also said that one of the virtual servers is a remote desktop server. It would be attractive to have a virtual remote desktop server but I think I read in another thread on here that it was a bad idea. Why?

Thank you all for a lot of further useful information. I am near certain we will go for local storage. Keeping things simple for one. Also not sure our current network infrastructure is fast or reliable enough to use for remote storage. Seemless automatic failover is I think not a requirement - recovery can I think wait for us to get another VM booted up. The memory usage figures are really helpful. Can you say where you get the figures from? When I look into memory measurement, I keep running into complications such as software using more memory if more is available.

I have been starting to do some reading and working out specifications. I am tending towards Hyper-V mainly as it seems, in the limited time available before bring it into use, that it would be easier for my colleagues and me to get our heads round, as Windows is what we are already used to, but I am not set on that. I was wondering what specification people used for a minimal server 2012 guest computer. A DC, for example, presumably does not need much in the way of memory or other resources. The minimum RAM requirement of Server 2012 is supposedly 512MB, but would you actually stick at 2GB? Similarly for hard disk, how much space do you give a windows partition? Or do dynamic disks make this fairly unimportant? It seems a pity to have to store 20GB+ of identical system files for each guest, but I suppose that is part of the price for the benefits of virtualisation. Do people tend to remove the GUI from guest Windows installs?

Certainly sounds like a plan for the other servers, though probably as a phase 2 after upgrading the main ones. Do you have any issues with the drivers in doing this? Presumably the virtual hardware cannot perfectly reproduce the original?

Thank you again all for further useful advice. How would you go about working out CPU, RAM and disk space requirements for a VM? Do you measure performance on existing servers or guestimate? How much overhead should be allowed for the OS on each VM (particularly how much disk space for system files)? The example server spec is really helpful, glennda. Are you suggesting the powerful desktop could actually be used as a virtual host if the main server is down or is the idea just a quickly accessible copy of the virtual machines in case of disk failure?

So long as the service does not turn out to be something critical, that sounds about right to me too, based on what andyire says.

If you add the -o switch to netstat (so netstat -abno) then it will also give you the process id of the svchost process that is using the port. You can then use something like process explorer to see what services are running in the svchost process with that id (services tab of the properties for the process in process explorer). There are likely to be several services in the process so it may not give you the culprit, but it might help.

Thank you to everyone for their thoughts, especially to Domino who gave me some extra tips in person at BETT. The apparently universal approval for virtualisation overcomes my doubts. I will definitely get researching and try to introduce it. Apart from the documentation of whichever virtualisation system we go for and these forums of course, are there any other sources of information on virtualisation that anyone would recommend?

Yes we do. How do hardware requirements differ from a server that does X,Y,Z to a server hosting virtual machines to do X, to do Y, to do Z?

I am due to replace our two main servers in the Easter Holidays. I have been wondering for a while whether to introduce virtualisation with this transition, but not got around to seriously investigating. It would be really helpful to have some feedback on whether this is a sensible idea. We currently have two servers, one at each end of the school, that both act as file server, DC, DHCP, DNS, print server, WSUS, anti-virus management, and practically everything else. The idea is that if one is down the other can maintain most functions: the files are replicated with DFSR. The replication works fairly well, but we have never had to use the redundancy in practice for any significant period. Then we have a MIS database server, a web server (that also does WDS because that was the only place I could fit it) and a media server (basically an old client with a big hard disk for sticking all the videos on). I think these are significantly underutilised compared to the main servers. My hope would be that virtualisation would allow easier disaster recovery and better balancing of the load between servers, but I am not sure we have a large enough network to make it worthwhile (about 100 computers, 400 users). I have used VirtualBox quite a lot with virtual client computers, but not touched server virtualisation software yet, so I am worried about whether I have time to get up to speed on virtualisation over this term. What do you think: should I plan to visualise?

Thank you all for your thoughts. I am interested to hear what Grumbledook's trainer says. Is there some legal or marketing reason why Google wants to bar businesses from using the Play store?

I am setting up a Galaxy Tab 2 we are trying out, and I noticed the following in the Google Play Terms of Service: (emphasis mine) Am I missing something or does that mean a school, particular a private school, could not use the Play store at all? What legal avenues does that leave for us to purchase apps? It seems bizarre for Google to be barring businesses from using the store. The Apple App store has terms specifically allowing use by businesses. Google Play for Education seems to be coming but not actually available yet, and it is not clear to me whether it will be available in the UK straight away.

Indeed... Well I gained some useful insights on WiFi issues for the future.

The 300Mbps figures given for N wifi reminds me of the "up to" figures on ADSL lines. It seems I have found the source of the problem rather more easily than I feared. Symantec Endpoint appears to be downloading 300MB of updates on each client, every time each one turns on, at least if it has not been turned on today already. So it is not really surprising connection speeds grinds to a halt. After waiting half an hour for Symantec to sort itself out, the laptops take about 40 seconds to turn on and another 40 to log in - not great, but acceptable. Now to work out how to get Symantec to behave! I think I might have to get the laptops to turn on each night to update or something.

Thank you for such a detailed answer Niel Mac, that was really illuminating. I was not aware that Wi-Fi devices were all listening to each other's packets in that way - certainly plenty to learn on Wi-Fi. I am pretty sure I checked and they were Gigabit, but I will double check.

Thank you all, some useful suggestions and reading for me. This one seems relevant. That is an interesting possibility. I had thought that it would be impractical due to a need to plumb a second aerial into the laptop. Is it actually more likely to be just a matter of swapping a card? That is a useful confirmation. I was wondering whether if I have two 1x1 clients and a 2x2 access point the access point could talk to both at once - if I understand you right the answer to that is no. So 10 1x1 clients all trying to transmit will put the same load on an access point over a particular time period as 10 2x2 clients all trying to transmit, even though the 2x2 ones can send more data in that period? Could you expand on "close in environments": wouldn't rate of collisions have more to do with congestion than distance from access point? Or am I missing something? The total data sent and received during login is something I would like to measure. I was thinking I may be able to measure it with a windows performance counter. Any other suggestions?

I just realised I forgot to mention how many clients - 20 laptops, with 2 N WAPs in range. The Ruckus system can do 5GHz as well as 2.4GHz on the same SSID, but I am pretty sure the laptops are 1x1 and 2.4GHz only (much to my annoyance). However the other suite of 20 apparently also have issues have 2x2 wifi cards and I think can use 5GHz. Do you have a rule of thumb for access point to laptops ratio?

My major project for half term is to work out why the laptop suites are taking so long to login when a whole class logs in at once. Login time for one laptop logging in on its own is fine, but when the whole class logs in at the same time a proportion of the laptops end up taking ridiculously long - 15+ minutes. Possibly not a wifi issue, but it seemed the most important factor so I put it in this forum. When the Windows 7 laptops were new a year ago, login times for the whole class were quite slow but acceptable. The accounts use a mandatory profile and settings have not changed that much. The Ruckus wifi system needs patching up to date. I also want to look into some of the hotfixes for login delay issues, but the fact that it only really happens when the whole class is logging in implies to me there is some kind of overload issue. The slow logging in laptops do not always seem to get stuck on one stage of the login, everything just seems to take longer. Has anyone any suggestions for things I could try or investigate?

We are going to trial a couple of tablets in our preschool, and want to compare an Android based device against an iPad. Initially it is mainly going to be the children using educational apps (closely staff supervised), but ultimately we may be moving towards collecting EYFS observations on tablets. Does anyone have any recommendations for suitable android tablets? I have a fairly generous budget on a par with an iPad 4. I do not know much about android devices, but I often hear good things about the Samsung Galaxy ranges.

I have been advised not to include Office 2010 in a WDS image - I think they said because it caused issues with KMS activation. However I have seen a few threads (example) where people saying they include it. Has anyone had problems? Is it necessary to rearm the Office installation or anything like that before capturing the image?

On the bright side, at least you had a PS/2 keyboard in the cupboard. I had a friend's boyfriend borrow one off me recently in order to enter a single keystroke to get past a BIOS message. May tomorrow be a better computing day!

Though "use" does not include deleting or renaming files. You have to pay $69 for the full version to do that.

Yes we do have another one, and it is working fine, so swapping parts may be possible. I will have a look at the image drum. Thanks!

I did print my test pages directly from the printer. I have not been through the whole suite of self-diagnostics yet as they seem to take rather a long time to run. Suggestions welcome on which is most likely to be useful. That is useful. No compatibles used. Is there a test I can do to tell whether it is the drum or fuser? Or is the best thing to get the image drum out and have a look?

Our CP3525n has caused no problems for the few years we have had it, but now it has started putting a black streak in a consistent position - see attached example. I have run several cleaning sheets to no effect. I tried doing a print out with each of the print cartridges out in turn, all with the same results. I am assuming something needs cleaning or replacing, but does any one have any suggestions how I work out what? Has anyone had a similar issue with a similar printer? Example.pdf