rmistry22

Hi All, I'm trying to get my head around this at the moment I'll be building two new servers, each probably hosting 3/4 virtual servers, should one server crash, the other should take over and host all machines. Both machines are 2 processor (E5-2665). Is the licencing per processor or per core? i.e for each server do I need 2 licences for datacentre or 8 licences one per core + 8 licences for hyper-threading? And if I just purchase standard licences do I need enough for each server to be able to host 7/8 machines? Arghhhhhh..... confused! Thanks for help in advance.

Hi All, thanks for the advise and making me feel welcome, hopefully I can contribute as well as taking stuff from the forums. I'm in south Birmingham, between M5 Junction 3 and 4. The school is currently Windows Server 2008R2, all the desktops are Windows 7, there are over 100 group policies which I haven't had the chance to try and understand yet. Everything appears to be locked down quite securely, logged in as a student prohibits you from doing pretty much anything including printing ! We currently have one server running everything, it is the DC, the DNS, DHCP and also the Microsoft HyperV host. It looks to me that the previous tech P to V'd an old Windows 2003 server and migrated all the policies etc. to the new server (the school were an RM network I think). HyperV is running the old Windows 2003 server (that I can't patch - refuses to run Windows updates) and an additional Windows 2008 Server that seems to be replicating the roles (not very clever !) and running the printer software (papercut). I patched this and the Exchange Server over the Christmas break, they had not been updated since installation in July 2013 - lots of panic moments, waiting for reboots We also have Sophos and Policy Central, I've figured out Sophos console, however all the agents on the PC's are all out of date and need to be re-installed, working through these as I re-image. Policy Central is running on an old laptop (the explanation given - sometimes the police take away the server for examination ) which is has issues of its own which I am working on. I've made some major improvements already, I installed and got up and running a FOG server (using an old PC) and have been busily re-imaging computers - two labs completed so far, two to go. I've re-configured the Dell Server, it has four nic's however the way it was configured all traffic was only routed via one nic (100mb/s) including the virtual servers. The cards are now teamed to give the server 200Mb/s and each virtual server has it's own dedicated 100Mb/s link. (resolved DNS issues at the same time, however I sometimes get errors about being unable to contact the virtual 2008 server) The storage currently is on multiple Buffalo NAS boxes, I'm not a fan, these things are running flat out and giving very poor performance and I can't see any clear backup of them. I working on kicking off a major project to introduce a virtual environment with two new servers, a storage array and a tape drive for backup's. Hopefully this will resolve my problems. Hoping also to get a network audit and firmware patch done soon and the group policies resolved. RM

Hi All, My first post. Worked in IT for almost 20 years, started very technical, then went on to very senior management roles. Made redundant from my last role so am now working in a academy on the outskirts of Birmingham. Been left a real mess, started work to start resolving issues, but where do I start !!!!! RMistry22