Tall_Paul

I think like all these things it depends very much on your instructor. I did the 2007 at Firebrand and the instructor, while she knew her stuff, was useless and uninspiring. In fact if I hadn't already installed SCCM I probably wouldn't have bothered after the course. Conversely the instructor I had for the MCITP:SA was absolutely brilliant.

Sounds like I will have to run through the install and see what happens! Did you install ADK before or after SCCM?

Thanks for that. Was installing BITS and Remote Differential Compressin pretty straightforward and are you using SQL Server 2012 Standard?

To anyone investigating SCCM, it is incredibly complicated. I'm done the 3 day Microsoft course and passed the exam and didn't think the course was much cop to be honest. I've had two years adminstering, fault finding and using SCCM and there is no substitute for using the product and getting your feet wet.

A quick question to those of you who have done a successful 2012 install and followed the Windows Noob guide for 2008 R2 installation. I got stuck at Step 7. Install .NET 3.5.1 and WCF Activation Can I ask how those of you who have done it did steps 7 to 9 on server 2012? I want to make sure the 'base' installation is right otherwise it's going to be a problem further on down the line.

In an ideal world I'd have a week or two to dedicate myself to trying to do the install, documenting it, then sharing it on the web. However, this is the real world so I'm hoping some other kind soul out there will be able to do it!

Essentially it's just me being lazy really. I don't want to go through the considerable pain of a migration onto a Server 2008 R2 box when I will have to go through the pain again to upgrade to Server 2012. Conversely I know from bitter experience that if you don't get the basic SCCM installation right then you are a storing up a whole world of pain for yourself further down the line (and a lot of troubleshooting and reading of log files). The only good thing is we aren't in a rush to deploy either Windows 8 or Server 2012.

Hi all I'm currently running SCCM 2007 R3, and am planning my migration to 2012 SP1. I've been reading the excellent guides on Windows Noob but am wondering if I should 'bite the bullet' and go for a Server 2012 with SQL 2012 Standard installation. My thinking behind this is I would like this to be a one shot migration, and if I install SCCM 2012 onto a Server 2008 R2 box I will only have to upgrade that at some point in the future. So, has anyone here done an install onto a Server 2012 box with SQL 2012 Standard? The only link I've found on the internet has been this one but that was back in October. So I suppose I'm asking everyone's advice really. Would you recommend waiting a while until more people have upgraded to Server 2012, or go for an SCCM upgrade but use the Windows Noob guide and put it onto a Server 2008 R2 box. Our SCCM 2007 R3 installation is working fine, so there is no big rush, but it is something I'd like to do soon (even if just for the ability to deploy Windows 8). Thanks.

Just to add to this thread I experienced this too on my Trapeze network and it was the certificate that had expired on my RADIUS server. This Technet article details the fix I used.

I might send you a PM about that if that's OK? Be good to pick your brains about what you did if we have an identical bit of kit (I especially like the reusability aspect).

Well, I had a successful meeting with my SLT yesterday where we agreed we need to recruit someone to work on the network side of things with me. So a network technician role will be being advertised in Torquay in the coming months (once it's gone through all the red tape here).

We use an RM 8TB diskbox (which I'm looking to replace) connected to a Tandberg 8 tape library. To back up all my virtual machines I use VEEAM. Backup Exec then pushes the veeam files onto tape (GFS tape rotation), along with backing up my three remaining physical boxes. We also use Attix (provided by SCOMIS) to trickle our most important data files into the cloud.

We currently use an RM Diskbox as part of a backup solution. It's now getting a bit long in the tooth and I'd like to replace it with something with a 5 year warranty (which is exceptionally expensive on the RM site). I essentially need something with about 8TB of storage (RAID 5 rather than RAID 0 would be nice, but much more expensive), a SCSI card (to connect to our tape library) and enough grunt to run VEEAM and Backup Exec. Thought I'd canvass opinion here first! Thanks Paul

It is a pain. So you have successfully installed 5.1 on your DL380s then?

I've been reading up on this as that's what I've got too. Apparently it has been done successfully but, as you say, isn't supported by HP or VMWare. Maybe, if you have the capacity, try it on one host and see how you get on?

I've just upgraded from 4.1 to 5.0 (avoided 5.1 for the moment due to a few issues I'd been reading about,). It took a lot longer than half a day! Here is what I did: Upgrade the VCenter server (this is quick - takes about half an hour). Upgrade each ESXi host. This wasn't quick, we have three so this involved putting each one into maintenance mode (so vmotioning off all the VM's on each host), rebooting and upgrading. Another side effect is you are supposed to disconnect the ESXi host from your SAN so you don't risk formatting any datastores. This took a loooong time due to our rubbish server racks! Upgrade VMFS on each of our datastores. The recommended way of doing this is to purge each datastore, and recreate it rather than just updating. Again, this took a looong time (a lot of storage VMotioning). Upgrade virtual tools on each VM (which requires a reboot). Upgrade the virtual hardware on each VM. The VM must be powered down to do this. Finally our VSphere Management Agent had to be recreated and linked back to our UPS. I didn't use Update Manager (though I will for the next upgrade) but the total time spent doing all the above was several days (and a lot had to be done out of hours too due to the VM reboots). It's simple enough, and well documented (I used this excellent guide) but don't underestimate the time required.

I was going to post a thread like this, so this is very timely. We have 30 virtual servers on three virtual hosts, 3 physical boxes, around 1050 student computers (the vast majority wireless) and 150 staff computers (wired and wireless). We handle everything computer related in the school. There are currently three of us and I am finding it is nowhere near enough. I'd love to know how others manage as all we are essentially doing at the moment is firefighting with more or less constant interruption. This presents a real problem when I need to take time out to, for example, plan a VMWare migration or Exchange migration, or investigate Server 2012 or Windows 8. I am currently having to investigate SAN replacement and WLAN infrastructure replacement on top of everything else. What has also happened (as it did with my predecessor) is that I am the network guru and my technicians do all the desktop and day to day stuff. The consequence of this is that if I leave or something happens to me my technicians will only be able to keep things ticking over until there is a big network problem (VMWare, switch failure, SAN failure, etc) as they never deal with it (as they are flat out doing all the desktop and day to day stuff). We desperately need more staff (and the school is intent on expanding further, including opening a sixth form and recruiting more staff) but it remains to be seen whether anyone will be brought in.

Another Exclaimer user here. It's a bit 'chatty' but works perfectly.

Just to add a bit more. Yesterday I tested the VPN connection by using my phone as a wireless access point. I successfully connected about two times out of thirty attempts. Today, after the change of method of address allocation, I have successfully connected six times out of six attempts. The acid test will be tonight when my users try from home but it already appears much more robust. So if you are reading this, have a TMG firewall with a remote access VPN configured on it, and are having connection issues then try the above!

Thought I'd update this after a day and half's fiddling! I think I've tracked it down to a DNS issue. The VPN clients connect but cannot resolve internal addresses, even with a FQDN. After further investigation I found my predecessor had set TMG to dynamically assign IP addresses. Apparently this isn't recommended so I'm now statically assigning them. I'm now testing to see if this improves reliability. Of course, why this has suddenly started being unreliable after years of faithful service is another question entirely!

Hi all Just thought I'd ask here if anyone has had any similar problems to me. Our firewall is TMG 2010, and all clients are W7. Users connect through a VPN connection I make for them through the W7 Network and Sharing centre. Now, this arrangement has worked very well for about three years. Admittedly it sometimes took some of my users a few connection attempts, but apart from that there have been no issues. All this changed a few weeks ago. We had a powercut which took down the vast majority of our servers apart from the firewall and the backup server. Everything all came back online OK with no noticeable affects (or so I thought). But, since around that time my users have been complaining bitterly about the VPN. It still takes a few connection attempts but quite often now drivers aren't mapped, or the user is unable to browse the internet. Sometimes, if they disconnect and reconnect a few times everything is OK but it's very intermittent. To make things more difficult, sometimes (at the same time) one VPN user will have no drive mappings, but another will. I've been tearing my hair out trying to find the problem. Have been through all the TMG logs and events but can't see anything untoward. I've since fully patched TMG and rebooted it a couple of times but with no joy. Has anyone here ever experienced anything like this and fixed it? If so I will owe you a huge debt if you can help!!

We use vSphere 4.1 here and have done since the school was built in 2009. It's been faultless. Am currently looking at upgrading to 5.1, but will give it another couple of months to let others find any bugs. In terms of backing up I'd thoroughly recommend VEEAM too (with the caveat that it is pretty resource hungry when backing up so you either need a meaty server, or spread VEEAM's components over more than one which is pretty easy to do).

We use Trapeze too (administered through Ringmaster) It's been reliable enough, though our major problems have been down to the initial implementation. There were nowhere near enough WAPs installed (15 devices per WAP recommendation) and that, coupled with physical network issues, means it can crawl when a lot of students are logging on (it can take over 12 minutes to log on, which goes down a treat).

Just a quick update. This is now up with level 3 support at HP, and I've ordered a Solwise USB NIC to see if that cures the problem (or at least isolates it).

We use a Network Policy Server with certificates on all the clients. Works fine, but not if the clients don't support 802.1X. I've seen about the MAC whitelisting too, but wondered how other schools interfaced wireless devices with their AD? I'm in an unfortunate position where we are a new build (one of the last schools under BSF) who had a lot of money spent on their infrastructure. Unfortunately the previous ICT manager, and the contractors who built the network, left virtually no documentation about how any of it was put together. Hence problems like this occur (and don't get me started on trying to get the blasted things to build with SCCM!)