Podium

Which, I believe, is why they have only just informed us of the increase so we don't have time to change, which makes me want to find an alternative even more.

We are in Nottinghamshire and just had info from the LA that our bill is being doubled!! So yes we are looking for alternatives but not really too sure where to start. We were one of the early adopters of EMBC now 1c1n so not had to deal with ISP's for a long time.

Bit of an update. I have managed to persuade the Head to pay for a HP ProLiant DL380 G7 Dual Xeon E5620 with 5 x 450GB 10K drives and 40GB RAM. We do already have a relatively new HP DL360 G7 which is only being used as a Remote WebApp machine at the moment. I have been following the thread School Server and infrastructure revamp but I simply do not have the budget for what they are suggesting. What would the advice be on how utilise the two servers I have. Perhaps use the DL360 as the DC with the DL380 as the file server and virtualise the other functions on to it or the DL380 as the DC and file server and DL360 doing the rest? Thank you for the advice given so far by the way.

I had looked at VMware but the cost just pushed the budget too far which makes Hyper-V the more reasonable solution. I have always shied away from using virtual machines because of the idea of one machine failing taking down multiple operations, as well as Microsoft's /sarcasmon perfectly straightforward licensing structure /sarcasmoff but it does seem to be a genuine option particularly for the lesser used functions.

So running the servers as VM's, is that simply a cost saving exercise or is there a distinct advantage to running each task on dedicated hardware?

We have been running CC3 in our school for around 7 years now, but we have now decided its time to go our own way. With CC3, we had the one big server that did everything (700+ users and 250 workstations) and am now looking to install a vanilla 2008r2 server infrastructure with spreading the load over multiple servers. Obviously you have the Domain Controller but after that how would you split the tasks over other servers e.g. 1 for user files, 1 for application, 1 shared folder etc. Any advice would be much appreciated.