dhoward_westexetc

The thing that comes to my mind with virtualisation is that it allows roles to be more isolated, if one causes a problem it does not necessarily bring the whole network down. The VLE moving to a VM would retire that older server. 1 GB RAM seems mighty tight to me for a 2008 R2 VM, 2 GB I think is the bare minimum for one role (the OS itself uses about 600 MB of that RAM), 3-4 GB for two-four roles per VM. Would definitely agree with leaving Citrix and Exchange on bare metal, unless they are uber-servers. I'm still of the mind that DCs, DHCP & DNS should be only on bare metal though. For the future definitely consider 3-4 new high spec servers, RAM of 24-36 GB, plus NAS/SAN for storage.

What is the number of NICs that Hyper-V supports then? I was thinking of two/three NICs connected if we move to 2008 R2, one for host services and two for Hyper-V.

For storage something like a NAS device, or a disk enclosure attached to a server via external RAID card (eg. Dell PowerVault or equivalent). Something that you can put about 12 hot-swap HDDs in, configured in RAID-6 for two-drive failover. Anyone else have any suggestions for storage?

I would have to agree about putting DHCP/DNS and AD onto the baremetal, this is what I was going to do if we move to 2008 R2, then put other roles onto Hyper-V VMs. There are some considerations about running AD in virtual machines, it is probably easier to just put AD onto the host servers then use the VMs for one or two roles each. 3 DCs is usually fine. DHCP/DNS - use failover clustering in Enterprise server. On a brief checking your servers support 5100-5400 series Xeons, based on Core architecture, these do not have hyper-threading. Only the 5500/5600 Xeons support hyper-threading as these are based on Nehalem/Westmere architecture. Two quads = 8 cores, so you are seeing the right number. On checking the Exchange requirements calculator a typical Exchange 2007 server would require about 12 GB RAM, based on the average twin quad core CPU and about 1500 mailboxes.

Looking further at your document, I also recommend the following: - The apps (Wordshark etc) on your current Server 7 could ideally be on a separate Hyper-V VM. - A RAM upgrade of the Hyper-V servers could also allow the VLE server to be virtualised? What are your plans also for file storage on the Hyper-V system? Will they be on the same servers as before or do you plan to purchase a new file server?

OK cool so it sounds like your OK for Hyper-V 1-4. Two VMs for each of those is about right if you give each VM 3 GB RAM (leaving 2 GB for the host OS). You need another Domain controller (two is the minimum really, so make server 7 on Hyper-V 4 another DC as well as the failover DHCP/DNS). Perhaps consider doubling the RAM on Hyper-V 1-4 to give another couple of VMs on each of those (if you plan to install 2008 R2 Enterprise server on those)? They look quite modern servers so the processors would probably handle them if they were quad cores. Are they Quad cores or dual cores? Backup - do you have an off-site solution (eg. through LEA?) Its best to have an off-site as well as an on-site solution. Just noticed that you are already Exchange 2007, so that is OK!

One thing to bear in mind is that with a license of Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition you can run 4 virtual machines on it as well as the physical host machine with that license. What sort of spec are we talking about for each server? To be comfortable running 4 VMs plus physical server OS you need at least 24 GB RAM in each server, plus a pair of quad core processors. Take a base RAM requirement for each virtual server of, say, 4 GB, then analyse what else that server will be doing and adjust as needed. Exchange is heavy so give that a good 12 GB RAM, quite a few CPU cores and plenty of storage space for the mailbox database. It may even need to be on a server on its own.

Windows 7 definitely does it, as I found myself in a similar situation, but I realised immediately it was desktop.ini, and it is a pain. Thankfully manually deleting that in the My Documents root does fix it, but I have not been brave enough yet to figure out a way to automate this using GPPs. I think there is a article in the Windows 7 gotchas list, but haven't tried implementing any of that yet.

Hey all, thanks for your help. Managed to fix my Libraries issue by....denying Students access to the Public folder location. Now the libraries comes up in an instant!!

Right, I have the slowness on the Start Menu shortcuts as well as those on the explorer bar. It does that even with the Public folder removed.

Is this for the business of a library folder taking 10 seconds to load up?

I may have to do that if my WSUS deny / policy preference for the registry doesn't work. I set my registry preference to update, so it will only do it if the browser choice screen is installed by mistake, but I will test this at a later time and update this post if I find I have to change this setting.

See my post here for a Microsoft KB article on this.

Microsoft have published a KB article on this: KB2019411 It contains the registry key to disable this. Could deploy using a policy preference? I'll give it a try later on.

I tried it on my test machine and I had no issues with it, wallpaper came up fine. All it did was switch my libraries back on again! Not sure why, but there you go.

One thing worth a try is to put all of the shortcuts under a folder called 'Programs', which sits in the root of the folder where the start menu is redirected to. You may find it will not only prevent them from appearing twice, but they may work too.

What a find! I was scratching my head over that one!

You are a class A hero! My Windows 7 student PCs are now complete !! I just have to build them now! I notice it only hides libraries, not disables them completely. I may still run the reg file to disable them, but this will solve the Favorites links as well.

Sorry to be slow to reply, been a hectic couple of days! This is the link to the web page that I found to disable Libraries: How to Disable “Libraries” Feature in Windows 7? - Tweaking with Vishal They come as a zip file. It is a per machine setting so you can run it once on the machine and it will apply to all users. You could even put it in the base image I guess!

Wondered what that was! I thought it was because the test PC I had wasn't running DirectX (because it was using the standard windows graphics drivers as there aren't any proper drivers for the 865GM graphics controller). Cool, have to bear that in mind then. Hope Microsoft release the hotfix in time for SP1 though!

Phew! I am glad I wasn't the only one! In the end I just googled the reg files to disable libraries completely and then found a neat little add-on to add the Classic Start Menu back to Windows 7. It is called Classic shell, and the homepage is here: Classic Shell. There are of course others, which are freeware. The nice thing about the classic menu is the links under documents are My Documents and My Pictures, not the libraries. All I have to do under our student policy now is find a way of removing the Favorites shortcuts (Downloads etc) in Explorer (they cause explorer.exe to crash, so removing them is more stable), remove the user folders links and tweak the start menu a bit then it is done!

I had the same issue on a Windows 7 client that I have at the moment for testing policies. Following AngryTechnician's guidelines seems to fix this in so far as the library only shows the redirected My Documents location and not the public one. However one issue I am not sure about is that, under a restricted student account I always get a pause of around 5-10 seconds before the library will open. This does not happen under Staff or admin accounts. Has anyone else had this issue and know a way to prevent this delay? It may be a policy setting we have that is causing this, but I am not sure what!

We are having the most bizarre problem with our new RM Ascend 2050 PCs. Certain machines, only one or two at any one time if at all, will suddenly start outputting random text, and we are totally perplexed! We don't know where the text comes from, presume it must come from another machine on site somewhere I guess. We have updated the network card drivers to the latest versions and this has not prevented this from happening. This does not happen to any other machine anywhere on the network. Has anyone else heard of this issue? We are running Windows XP SP3 on them, Impero version 2.3.2 and exactly the same software as other PCs on the network. Any ideas from anyone?

RM Ascend 202B desktop: Processor - 3GHz P4 Prescott 64 - 3.5 RAM - 2GB DDR2 - 4.4 Graphics - Radeon Xpress 200M - 2.2 Gaming graphics - 3.1 Primary hard drive - 80GB PATA ATA-133 - 5.5 Index - lowest subscore - 2.2 Dell Latitude D520: Processor - Core 2 Duo T5500 - 4.4 RAM - 2GB DDR2 - 4.4 Graphics - Intel 945 - 2.0 Gaming graphics - 3.1 Primary hard disk - 2.5" SATA 60GB - 4.7 Index - lowest subscore - 2.0 Interesting how an 80GB IDE desktop drive has a higher WEI rating than a mobile 60GB SATA !!

I think the best way is to install Windows Server 2008 on the new server and promote that one to a Domain Controller, but on the Windows 2000 function level (i.e. don't change it to the 2008 function level!) You can then gradually move each role over from the 2000 server to the new server. Only once all is well with the new server, say for about a month or so, then retire the old server as a domain controller and shut down the old server.