VeryPC_Ed

Hey Mark, We've been a Starwind partner for about 10 years and Starwind VSAN works quite well and is stupidly simple to manage (which is nice). We've seen an increase in people looking at S2D but as dazza007 says, costs vary depending on what cards and kit you use - I'd recommend sticking to a vendor validated solution (like Dell Readynode etc.) to ensure you are covered for support if any issues. We just recently did an SCv3020 (SAS) install for a school and it's a great bit of kit, very simple to setup and was surprisingly fast. If you have any questions, drop me a PM.

Hi Jordan, Glad to hear you are sorted, I'm no deployment expert but if memory serves me correct (from my limited experience with imagex back in the day), using index specifies which image in the .WIM you are making the change to (I believe), so if things haven't changed that much and your .WIM has multiple images inside, you can inject different content into each. it's been a few years since doing any CLI tasks with deployment, if you have any further issues, please feel free to get in touch with our support team who can escalate to the production team any issues you have with deploying on our kit. Thanks, Ed

If you are looking at P2V / Consolidating existing workloads, I would recommend first of all performing an analysis of what you have currently and then work from there to determine what you need. An quite commonly overlooked tool is the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit - this will allow you to inventory your estate, then perform a performance analysis to see what CPU/RAM/Network and importantly - what IOPS your current infrastructure is using. Then from this, you can get some more insight to then look at selecting a specification and subsequent solution. For the actual virtualization side of things, there are a whole host of options available, from simple replication using Hyper-V Replica / Veeam Replication jobs to Windows Failover Clustering using a NAS/SAN or one option we can provide is a 2 Node HA Cluster (Compute and Storage) using Starwind Virtual SAN for Hyper-V. I'd be more than happy to have a chat with you to try and work out what you need and then look at some options. Thanks, Ed

Hey Sagima, We supply our own Intel branded servers as well as HP kit. I'll PM my details - let me know if you want to discuss some specs / pricing. Thanks, Ed

No worries, we sell Draytek from time to time and I have had to set-up a 2850 a while back for one of our support customer for same reason Thanks, Ed

https://www.draytek.co.uk/support/guides/kb-vigor-ssl?highlight=WyJ2cG4iXQ==&return=1921959 You need to register for the draytek site but that guide should help if you are using an SSL VPN / Draytek smartclient. Thanks, Ed

Hi Nathan, We also do EES licensing so if you want another quote, feel free to PM me what you need. Again as others have said, pricing is one thing but making sure you are licensed correctly is a big one !! Thanks, Ed

Hi Six, We can definitely help out with the hardware (HP/Intel) and migration/services side of things, I'll send you a PM with my email etc. to get the ball rolling Thanks, Ed

Hehe, no worries Lunch does sound like a good idea !!

I think VHDX is up to 64TB in 2012 R2 ? One thing to look at regarding LUN's etc. is if you are using Windows Failover clustering with Hyper-V, you would be looking at Cluster Shared Volumes and storing your VHD's on those. Ed

Sent you a PM mdrabble !

Hi Blu4 I personally wouldn't recommend using Barracuda drives as they are consumer drives and not really designed for server usage. If anything use something like Western Digital RE4 or Seagate Constellation as these are designed for critical workloads, yes they cost more but they have the features that make them more reliable. We've been doing Supermicro builds for donkeys years, if you want a comparative quotation on this or to ask anything - drop me a PM. Thanks, Ed

We've been supplying ISCSI SAN's with mixed storage in for ages as it's one of the big selling points for us is that we don't just box shift a chassis with X disk in them off the shelf, we try to help people tier data where possible - saves cash and gives better performance !! Ed

I've run a few test setups with Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and SMB 3.0 internally and it's a definite alternative to the traditional option of using ISCSI shared storage, seems to be much simpler and the performance has been really good (moar nics!) and keeps costs low. A good post about the scale out file server / Hyper-V (and website for all things Hyper-V is Aidan Finn's blog - Yes, You Can Run A Hyper-V Cluster On Your JBOD Storage Spaces | Aidan Finn, IT Pro - he's one of the Microsoft Virtualization MVP's) Let me know if you want any quotes on storage ! Ed

Sorry newpersn..I seem to have abducted/kidnapped/infiltrated and ultimately derailed the thread totally from its original purpose Going back on topic - the last few dedicated (physical) servers I have talked to people about supplying for SIMS have been quad core Xeon E3 or E5 with 8GB Min with some SSD (Intel S3500) storage. I'll make another dedicated thread when i get a response on the licensing so I don't contaminate the thread further !!!

Hi Arthur, This is correct, however the confusion is over SERVER + CAL model for SQL (under EES) rather than Per Core which is pretty straight forward. Still waiting on a reply from someone at Microsoft as there is no customer/partner facing licensing team and we have to go through disti normally - not helpful when one says one thing and the other tells you another !!!

I've had a quite lengthy email from our disti which had their Microsoft contacts response - just waiting to speak to our own Microsoft account manager to discuss their response before updating further !

The plot thickens.. Spoke to another disti and they have contradicted what our original supplier has said Going to look into this and update later when have some more info.

Just got off the phone from our distributor and they say that if you are licensing using server and CAL, then you need to have the appropriate amount of CAL's as the quantity shouldn't be reported based on the FTE. I asked if there was any unwritten rule and they said they hadn't heard of anything like that. I'm asking another disti we deal with to make sure that this isn't just there interpretation but from what I can see in the documentation, the SQL Cal's are not companywide and not eligible for FTE count. Ed

I could be wrong but that's what our disti has always told us - I'll ask them to confirm again just to be sure (don't want to spread misinfo!). Ed

I believe FTE count is only for Desktop Platform products only, the rest are bought as needed, same as why you buy x copies of Server 2012 R2, rather than FTE x Server Count. This is what our disti has always said you need to be compliant - they could be wrong but that's how I understand it and what has been advised. The issue with EES and many suppliers is that there is hardly any oversight from Microsoft and you can order what you want and not be compliant and a lot is open to interpretation. We have seen people with Windows O/S and no CAL's etc. The biggest thing that people don't realise is that you need a qualifying O/S for the Windows Client licenses to be valid as they are essentially upgrade licenses.

Hi Guys, For SQL server you need to either buy the server on a per core license (minimum 4 cores - so 2 x 2 core licenses) or server + CAL method. Also SQL cal's are not part of the desktop platform and are additional products - NOT based on FTE so you need to license on a 1:1 basis for the users accessing the SQL instance. (unless using per core licensing). e.g 1 SQL Server and 100 users / 100 devices = 1 SQL Server License and 100 Cal's (Dev or User) or 2 x SQL Server Per Core (No Cal's Required). Thanks, Ed

As everyone else has said, visio is great for this stuff. You can get loads of stencils at VisioCafe free visio stencils download site Ed

No worries If the DC is offline for a period of time and then comes back on-line, the internal counter for AD (Cant remember the name off the top of my head) will have rolled and it shouldn't start bashing your environment as all other DC's should reject sync requests from it to them so it shouldn't corrupt. But yeah - DC snapshots - that's a paddlin' Ed

Well our Starwind HA setup's which are active-active so everything is replicated in real time so yes you can lose a storage node and it should keep on ticking but HA isn't a substitute for protecting against data corruption. Depending on the backend for your workloads, say SQL can be clustered so you could run 2 VM's in a cluster (Guest Cluster) with one on separate nodes and then if one goes down, then the cluster remains up. Domain Controllers should be replicating with other DC's in the domain so losing a single DC shouldn't be the end of the world. As to other workloads, it's a case of looking at what you can do to protect them such as whether they support clustering or backing up SQL/File data as often as is possible/feasible - say Veeam or DPM on a very tight synch schedule. Ed