HPlum78

Once the shutdown.exe has started with the -f and a -t of 0 you will find it a little hard to strike up a task to shutdown the hosted VMs as the OS is killing the PIDs! change the way the shutdown command is run and give your host sometime to shutdown the VMs gracfully with a script or with the hyper v tools.

Look for events 1074/76 (need to check those event IDs are correct) in the system log by running a scheduled task on start up. Think this would be the way to go(although a UPS would not go a miss!) you can eMail or as I would send an SMS (or both). anyhow something like this #Search the system log $data=Get-EventLog -EntryType Error -LogName System | ?{$_.EventID -eq 1074 -or $_.EventID -eq 1076} $emailFrom = "[email protected]" $emailTo = "[email protected]" $subject = "Events 1074 and 1076" #Could I guess fish out the time of the events and add them to the body of the mail. Using the Get-Eventlog Cmdlet $body = $data #if this is running at start up and you have no UPS and all your servers go down, I would maybe give your mail server chance to be there! $smtpServer = "your smtp server" $smtp = new-object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($smtpServer) $smtp.Send($emailFrom, $emailTo, $subject, $body PowerShell is your friend here, say that all the time!

Here is the answer to your questions! if you work out MS licensing let the rest of us know! WS2012_Licensing-Pricing_Datasheet.pdf

it is by far the best way forward, RAM is all I will add! and don't forget licensing!

Sounds like the right thing to do, question is, is if you only have two servers how are you going to move stuff around while getting hyper v on the server that runs your world? I have on more than one occasion hung domains on client hardware! when upgrading and moving stuff because of being in the position your in.

errr, GP is the way! anything else would just be another way to well group policy! I don't understand why you would not use/ add another policy to manage your office settings? I have worked on some big networks in and out of education and seen some big and i mean big group policy structures, one more/ add the setting to a default student policy that is already in use will not make any difference.

Have these computers got multiple NICs in?

Here is a the whitepaper released on this subject for server 2k08, I have not looked but I guess they have redone the tests with 2k12.WS08_R2_VHD_Performance_WhitePaper.docx

DNS first, can you tell us if this is Domain integrated DNS?

Make sure that the Libraries are removed at the time of imaging, copy the admin profile to the default profile before you image, then set the copy profile value to true in your answer file. As the windows docs are not the best on this here is a link to the info we used to get shot of them on our student machines Deployment Research > Research - How CopyProfile really works in Windows 7 Deployments If you are not able to reimage then you can try to gp a reg hack you can find those here How to Enable or Disable the Libraries Feature in Windows 7 Hope this helps

I have a number of years working in Schools/ Colleges and Unis and have used on many occasions a company called European Electronique (euroele.com)

Good question gmonks, only happens on the HP that me and my network admin have on our desk and we can live with it! I am sure we could work it out on our computers if we really wanted. Tested on our other computers and we have not had the same issue else you are correct it would not be deployed!

Earlier in this post someone showed some PowerShell, you can do both with PS Stop-Computer will shutdown computers and along with Get-Content you could put the names of all the computers in a file and have it shutdown whole networks, or you could do something more sophisticated and create an array out of AD with the names of the workstations then I suppose you could test if they are powered up and if a users is logged in and the like (although Stop-Computer will throw an exception if a user is logged on and you don't use the -Force) all not so difficult if you spend a little time. Use along side WOL starter for 10 here Script Send WOL packet using Powershell again don't take much to make the script get MAC addresses from AD/ DHCP. PowerShell is your friend here and can save some money and I think if you give it a little thought you can make a solution that works well for your network needs rather then trying to make an off the shelf solution do what you want.

Have been running it on my computer since beta, and my network drops out as well although not to the point of having to restart! I could see that being a bit of bind. Any how I am starting to deploy it to the rest of the network now. My take on this is that if the students can go in to PC World and get a computer using the latest OS then we should have it on our desktops in schools as I feel its a dis-service to not be as current as possible, although with my network head on I also have to think of my and the other guys in my departments sanity so have delayed this OS install until now!

I seem to remember reading about version numbers for VMWare and various server editions sometime ago, a patch was released to solve replication issues. I will have a dig about when I get a min, problem is I no longer use VMWare kit so it will have been a passing interest rather than me needing to know!

I have used a number of these products over the years but 3 years ago moved to Sophos and have just renewed for another 3 years, these are good boxes and I have not paid a lot to be honest. Setting up WCCP on this box was a simple on this box as well something I have had problems with in the past on other systems, that said I have not touched any other product for a long time so cannot comment how others do in this area anymore. This along with devices profiles make managing guest/ BYOD wireless services easy also easy to setup.

Just a guess have you got Forefront protection for exchange on your exchange box?

We use PowerShell to do this, first we connect(ed) to Facility now iSAMS and create/ disable and update all our users in AD from our MIS software, then we have another script that allows staff members to reset student passwords via a mail that they send to a rest.password mailbox this can be restricted with AD groups, and also means that you do not need install the AD stuff on desktops. If this is the sort of thing you are looking for let me know and I will strip out the scripts and post. FIM is an awesome bit of kit but unless you are a college or uni its a bit overkill in my opinion.

Is GPMC reporting that your servers are in sync? if so then its not reporting a difference between your DC's. This error is usually caused by a mismatch between the Default Domain Policy DS and the Sysvol portions of AD.

Sted is correct they are built into the AD DS install, however they are available here \Support\Adprep folder of the operating system disk. I am still old school on this and like to run them separate to the AD DS installation no need to these days though.

I thought the days of not multi rolling servers had long since gone with the advent of server 2000, and I have been running networks in schools, unis, colleges and businesses since NT3.1 when multi rolling was not so good! But these days I would not waste time or licences on running multiple server installations for the above two roles even with virtualization! Also if you feel that multiple VMs are needed because splitting up roles is paramount then ask yourself about what you are virtualizing on to! if the reason is they should not share the same server then surly they should not share the same host? unless your infrastructure is one that is fully redundant? That's not to say that single role single server is not to be done just think about the importance of the roles.

In place upgrades do work from 2008 R2 to 2012 (need more than 1 DC), that said only do this in none production environments as its not recommended or indeed supported. As stated above I would now wait for 2012 r2 to be released. Then do a migration to a new server 2012 server, so adprep /forestprep on your existing environment, then on your new server 2012 - Server Manger and add the AD stuff. Then move the FSMO Roles from Server 2008 r2 DC to new Server then demote your original DC out. Clearly checking after each step that replication has taken place and that version numbers on the schema are correct and the like (plenty of TechNet stuff on this process guys) also would be the time to think about a second DC for those who only have one!

If you can run DCDiag /test:DNS /v /e > C:\DCDiagTest.txt and send the output file to me I will take a look and see if I can shed some light on it.