Tallwood_6

Sophos cost scale depending on what you bundle and how many years you sign up for. It's not cheap I think we are looking at around 8k for endpoint and email for 3 years renewal for our site.

I dont have much involvement with parentpay here I leave it with finance, but we do use it already for trips etc the idea being with the exception of a few once NRS is in we will be completely cashless.

If you have sims then the best method is to have sims sync with parentpay (parentpay have an app for this) then have nrs talk directly to parentpay. If you have cmis like us though you have to manually upload any changes to parentpay and manually upload pictures from cmis which is a royal pain.

We have just ordered NRS here after demos of cunninghams vericool. NRS stood out as the software seemed the most user friendly, front and backend and is entirely there own unlike the others. The tills and readers also seemed much more robust, the only negative is in the default setup seem to run everything from nothing more than a pc setup for use by the canteen staff if this goes down then your in trouble.

To be fair this isnt a frog issue i have the same issues uploading the material to the serco VLE. Serco themselves even went through and repacked a couple of titles which got it up but made it a nightmare to search through. We contacted oxbox and they said the packages where faulty and sent me some newer revisions but i had exactly the same issues and gave up in the end and many of the titles have since been returned.

Yes you can get a 3rd party to do it, we have and rm will continue to support the software just don't expect them to deal with any virtual inferstructure related problems or disaster recovery of the severs themselves. Vmware cold clone cd was the method used here I believe rm cold clone using a 3rd party piece of software similar to what they use when they undertake server hardware migrations.

Is also my experience with the LEA here in kent, although i'm sure many will disagree. Connection and filtering is good and support is also good but are completely unwilling to move and have been very underhand and childish with how they are handling the current price hikes. I.e. no direct communication with network managers about pricing and policy, giving schools less than the required notice period to cancel there connection before releasing prices which locks them in for another year at the least. Fortunately i saw this coming and shopped about so will be moving away from the LEA in the next couple of months where hopefully we will be getting better speeds for less money and will have the flexibility to do as we wish with the connectivity. The idea being now we will be paying thousands to feel like a customer rather than just a user on the LEA network which is how we feel treated now. We are fortunate enough though to be in a reasonably urban area with the choice of both virgin and BT leased lines so appreciate the problems that more rural schools face.

Ok i will share the statics which they quoted "Over 1/2M XP stations and about 20,000 Vista stations in the field. We also already got ~ 20000 W7 stations" We only have maybe 30 vista stations so prehaps i dont have much call for compaint but an awful lot of schools who took up CC4 in the first year or two will no doubt have scatterings of vista machines, some did commit there whole network to vista as the login times for XP where abismal before SR1. And know you wouldnt have thought knocking out SP2 and the subsequent hotfixes through WSUS would be all that time consuming especially given that SP2 is more of an update roll up unlike SP1 but then i'm not a developer i suppose.

I also not particulary happy that this decision has been made especially without consultation with customers. My account manager has forwarded a number of my concerns on to development who where quick with a response, i wont post the response here as i dont think it would be fair but i dont think they have properly concidered the repercussions for a number of schools.

Well my idea of a decent SAN is something like a Equallogic, Lefthand, Netapp, Sun Unified Storage Storage etc but prehaps i'm just a snob. But you are going to want something that primarily offers you the IOP's and speed required education environments are somewhat unique in that your regulary getting large number of users either logging on, saving or accessing the same file all at once. Space should be a secondary concern.

Again though we dont know what hes factored into the cost so until he comes back and confirms the scope of what he needs we are just making assumptions.

We are assuming however that he has 1.) A decent core switch to run the iscsi traffic over and juddging by the ammount of money spent on the SAN this looks doubtful. 2.) He doesnt have to purchase additional licences for OS/ Backup software management etc. 3.) He already has some means to backup all this extra storage. 4.) We also dont know the IOP's requirements for the VM's in question and the number of stations and users is being supported. With this in mind £4k isnt alot to work with.

To be honest i wouldnt risk running most of my infrastructure of a £4000 SAN, presumably this cost has also got to include the cost of some iscsi switches as well which is going to set you back £900 odd for say two 2510-24G Procurves which isnt going to leave you much at all for a SAN which is going to give you the performance and redundancy you need. Do you have anything to backup all this data to or indeed licences for some backup software that will take VM backups etc the cost can add up.

Just payed just over £1700 for a 24port gigabit power other ethernet module and you can get some decent bidding pricing for those switches from HP resellers usually.

delinvfile or similar would do the job, you can download a working trial.

The annoyance: Just virtualizing everything 4.0 u2 The fact that vCenter will only be installable on a 64bit OS in has been circulating or some time along with them dropping ESX completely in the next version in favor of ESXi which is more o a pain.

You would require an awful lot of internal storage to replicate the data across all your hosts, and you are still not getting the scalability as you would with a proper SAN.

I'm not sure i'd be completely happy with this approach, the idea of a SAN is to provide cost effective storage growth which your simply not getting with local server storage, not to mention the time it may take to restore a failed host VM's vs how quickly you can be up and running with a SAN.

From the quotes i've had recently £15k will strech to a HP Lefthand P4300 SAS Starter SAN 4.8TB and will also get you into a Dell Equalogic PS4000 SAN. SATA, SAS, or Solid State you will need to look at what you are likely to to be running and the IOP's requirements, capacity should be a secondary consideration but given what you are looking to virtualize SATA drives would be fine, but should you wish to move SQL and Exchange boxes onto this in the future then SAS maybe a wise choice.

I have no brand loyalty in terms of desktops or laptops but find i can never get Dell's pricing to match HP in terms of like for like kit, i.e recently the HP elite 8100 vs the OptiPlex 980 was about £80 per unit in favour of HP (same motherboards/ chipset, processor, RAM, warranty etc). In terms of reliability i brought 150 odd Lenovo M58's last year and have not had a single niggle and the build quality is excellent, that said i would not buy them again as they messed as around with delivery dates. Switches Procurve all the way, some of the Dells look good on paper but you must keep warranties up to scratch to get software updates & servers there isnt alot between Dell & HP although Dell's line up does seem to cater on the face of it more to virtualized environments.

Well the 2610's are all 100mb so are only really comparable to the 2510 non gigabit models, in switch case the hardware specifications are the same for both apart from the 2510-48 having a smaller port buffer the rest looks to be software with the 2610 series offering some limited layer 3 functionality.

Data in a SAN will often be in a raid 6, 10 or 50 which will tollerate multiple disk failures, will have multiple controllers which will be connected to multiple switches with multple paths to the hosts. If you are still paranoid then you can purchase 3/4 hour call out warrenties for the SAN or an additional unit for replication. So with a decent SAN and correct setup then you have little to be worried about.

If you can do without the storage vmotion then you could save yourself some money on vsphere advanced and vcenter foundation if your only likely to have a max of 3 hosts.

I stand corrected. Depending on the edition you buy into though your also missing update manager, hot add, fault tolerance, vmotion, storage vmotion and vcenter support which are all important features in my book if your spending large amounts of money on a SAN and new hosts and hope to fully leverage the hardware. I appreciate this is a cost many may not be able to justify though.

Its free to a point, hyper v really benifits from having misocroft systems center and esxi free will only licence one physical processor and is feature limited.