limawhiskey

Thanks @steve_forbes. Yes, I realise this grey area will exist but by all accounts, Scale's support is exemplary, so to me that will be a very small risk. I fully expect we will fall into your "very few issues" camp.

@bossman @deano3693 Thanks. You both mention RM did not commission the hardware so that's promising. Were there any problems when they came to commission servers or add their services on top? How did you deal with that?

@steve_forbes - is there an official line on virtualisation with CC4? Any flexibility for other platforms, assuming we manage support of the platform? I understand that the hardware would not come under the list of technologies for network support. If the guest OS (Windows Server 2012) and RM service software can see CPU, memory and disk as normal then I take it all the RM side will run ok and be none the wiser?

So, whats' the underlying hardware / software for your CC4 install? I'm considering Scale HC3 but RM don;t seem keen to want anything to do with it. I can't really see the problem; as far as I can tell, RM don't do anything intelligent to talk to the underlying architecture. RM's fixed price menu for virtualisation is "X hosts and a SAN", or "we'll sell you a Dell VRTX if you really want it". I'd be interested to see what other people are running. Feel free to educate me about what I might be missing.

This doesn't solve your particular problem but may be a workaround for you: I have set up a 'service' user and I use these credentials to log in to Google's secure SMTP send mail for similar services. You could use the same technique to get your mail delivery going again. I just put that user in an OU with permissions for SMTP access and allowed port 993 through the firewall for the devices that need access. Sorry, I can't help with trouble shooting your mail relay - I didn't have the skills to set this up when we migrated to G Suite!

Argh, had cleared this for the 13th with the Missus. Can't do the 20th now I'm afraid Enjoy the food and I'll hope to meet you guys on the next one.

Meet for meat? I like it. Hope this is an open invitation. Would be good to put some faces to names P.S. Doodle is a god send for getting this sort of thing off the ground: Easy scheduling | Doodle My suggestions: Almost Famous (seconded) Solita Bar and Grill LUCK LUST LIQUOR & BURN

Looks like there's space for a couple more so my suggestion would be add two more and re-wire their pins to have each pair wired in series to each header, thereby halving voltage and reducing spin speed. Might be a good idea to test the circuit at various voltages first, that way you know the fans will still spin. I have no idea about air flow theory with fans but assuming it's a a linear relationship that ought to maintain the total air flow.

When the server stops responding or you can't connect remotely, can you verify that the time is incorrect by logging in from the vSphere console with a local account? Just thinking to rule out your time issue.

They seem to have a quite a few KB articles about time sync. See also Troubleshooting NTP on ESX and ESXi 4.x / 5.x / 6.x (1005092) | VMware KB

Is the time out of sync on your host? VMware have a pretty comprehensive article which helped me: Timekeeping best practices for Windows, including NTP (1318) | VMware KB

A quick google seems to imply that the Alcatel switches come with a RJ45 to DB9 adapter A bit more google fu came up with this (although it references the 7450 I would guess it's the same configuration): Cabling and Pinout Lookup Table | Terminal Server | Perle Leading to this product: Buy Perle DBA0020 Or you could buy a customisable adapter and arrange the pin configuration that you need: DB9 to RJ45 Modular Adapter - F/F | Serial Adapters | StarTech.com United Kingdom

I had no idea this was gone [emoji20] It was very useful while it lasted. In case anyone else was wondering: Where has SIMS Bulk Import gone? | Matt40k

No, I haven't heard of that product, just having a look into it now. Do you have any idea of rough costs for it?

Is that with native Windows / Hyper-V options or some third party integration?

It would work well as a proof of concept and cost benchmarking project. I assume you can pull the guest back to a local one again if costs get out of hand. I'd actually be really interested in the findings as the only estimates I managed to get were from a supplier that specialised in cloud services. It didn't make sense when we looked at moving our services; the estimate over just three years far exceeded the cost of hardware to run a small cluster of VMs in house. Clearly internet is not close to LAN for latency but gigabit connectivity is now pretty affordable.

That sounds like a good design. I take it you have to manually power up the VMs in the result of a failure of one host? Did Hyper-V replication provide some features that Veeam replication couldn't? So you went for fewer, larger disks and the same with DIMMs? Fits my requirements nicely

That sounds like a good design. I take it you have to manually power up the VMs in the result of a failure of one host? Did Hyper-V replication provide some features that Veeam replication couldn't? So you went for fewer, larger disks and the same with DIMMs? Fits my requirements nicely

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I considered it after I saw one in a colleague's school a few weeks back and they were very happy with it too. However in terms of design it's still a single point of failure. I think we can improve on that design within the same budget, or at least not pay over the odds for a design that does have a single point of failure.

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I considered it after I saw one in a colleague's school a few weeks back and they were very happy with it too. However in terms of design it's still a single point of failure. I think we can improve on that design within the same budget, or at least not pay over the odds for a design that does have a single point of failure.

So over the next five years I can see us scaling back on site services and moving to education cloud offerings like G Suite or Office 365, but for now we need to renew our virtual server and backup infrastructure that was new in 2010 but is now out of warranty. The question is, what should that hardware look like in 2017? Currently we have two hosts and a SAN with backup to another building and duplicated to tape. We have around 1,500 students and 180 staff. On the infrastructure we're running a dozen VMs, mostly Server 2012 R2 with the usual network services. In addition we have: SQL (for SIMS). vCenter for VM management. Terminal server (2003 soon to be updated to 2012 R2), for at most 30 seats of remote desktop / app access, in place mainly for staff to use SIMS remotely. Cashless catering. And the odd low demand Linux server for various services (e.g. Xibo running on Ubuntu for signage). So nothing too crazy. Cost estimates to run these VMs in the cloud indicates an 'as-is' cloud move is a non-starter, and reliance on internet connectivity is not very desirable. Changing/improving ICT is not a focus for SMT here so they are not wanting to change the way it works for staff and students at the moment, so a full move to Office 365 and/or G Suite is a no go in the short term, although we do use G Suite for email. Spec'ing this sort of infrastructure kit is not my area of expertise so I have asked a few suppliers for their proposed refresh designs to set the ball rolling. I haven't been too enamoured with the results. Across the board I have basically had an update of the current setup; two or three hosts and a SAN (either direct attach or iSCSI), with backup covered by a staging server / NAS then dupe to tape via an autoloader. My bone of contention with this design is that I identify the SAN as single point of failure (see the King's College case - and that was a lot more high-end than our shared storage will be). We don't have the budget to go down the replica/redundant SAN route. Therefore a SAN based design doesn't improve on our current setup, nor is it actually better than a design of one (suitably spec'ed) host running all our VMs on local storage. In fact, you could argue it's worse as it introduces more complexity into the system. My ideas are, in the order that I perceive to be least to most expensive: Single host with solid backup/replication strategy. Disaster downtime limited to next business day hardware replacement and restore time. Two hosts; one main host and another replicated host in a ready state for failover. A new stand-by host might be seen as a 'waste' in this design, so could utilise the old hardware on a temporary/best effort basis, falling back to the single host plan above if necessary. Two or three hosts in a 'hyperconverged' cluster configuration, eliminating the SAN SPOF (e.g. StarWind, Scale Computing). I'd also consider backup to cloud (e.g. Redstor), assuming we could demonstrate that costs over time are roughly comparable to buying all the new hardware. A minor complication is that we're running RM CC4.5 but at this level of abstraction it shouldn't matter what is running the guest VMs. It would be easiest if we can use VMware to migrate the VMs as they are, but I'm not opposed to changing hypervisor. So, those of you who are thinking about this sort of project currently, how are you designing your systems?

That's impressive. I won't show it to our lot here otherwise they'll be 'accidentally' putting some oily rags in the tumble dryer!

Thanks all for the replies. We're now an academy so recently started paying Capita direct for licence renewals ("Annual Entitlement"). It's the first time I have seen billing for SIMS - it seems to be licensed in 'bundles' of modules. I have checked and some of the bundles include modules we are not using, e.g. Equipment register, but each bundle has a module that we do use (if that makes sense!) so I don't think we can slim it down. Price difference for support is over £3k on face value, though the LA do have some training that we (minimally) use whereas RM charge rates of £ 175 / 95 for full / half days. As we don't use much training, we should still see a decent saving.

We are considering our options for SIMS support and the RM quote is significantly cheaper than our LA buy back. The LA do provide us with good service but we can't ignore the potential cost saving. So, does anyone have good / bad / ugly experiences of RM's (Salford based) SIMS support team? Experiences from end users of SIMS would be great - I don't use SIMS much apart from dealing with installs / updates. Thanks

Google running interference on 365?