Tallwood_6

I'd email your account manager explaining the situation, if they think it will impact future sales they will soon budge.

This is very true, from speaking to RM the details seem far from concrete. RM i think would like to offer support to customers internally for Virtualisation but VMWare will are unwilling to let RM field these calls. Some internal dicussions i believe are still occuring & is probably the reason why RM have been so slow to jump on the VM bandwagon.

Am i missing something hardware warrenties are seperate from server support contracts. i.e. you have servercare for the server & then a seperate contract in the form of say 'additional server support'. If you cancel or fail to renew your servercare but cary on your server support that is up to you they cant expect people to carry paying for hardware support for servers no longer in use.

Sorry i could be wrong with the addional support contract, just looked over the budgetry quote i had and the support is looks to be only VMWare, although i'm sure an additional RM support contract was mentioned at some point when we met.

You think CC3 is bloatware, its a good job you dont use CC4!

They certainly arnt stupid, quite a number of customers have already done it though so i think they now realise if they are missing out on some serious money and if they dont offer some form of support and implimentation they will end up with customers using a variety of different virtualization products and configurations which could prove a minefield when it comes to diagnostics.

RM will actually impliment and support vsphere for customers now, you have to take out another support contract though & most of the support will still come from VMWare.

Yep another vote for the procurve, got a 5400 and the older 4200 series both are excellent & the 5400 will go 10gbit as well.

We have a storage server running 2003 storage server which has backup exc 12.5 you install either the normal backup exc agents on your virtual servers (they dont know they are virtual) or if you like some of the VM agents. The Quantum autoloader then connects straight into the storage server via SCSI and is very quick. would highly reccommmend LTO 4 comming from AIT 3 & 4, its much quicker and proving much more reliable and should provide you with plenty of capacity for future growth.

D2D2T incorporating a decent NAS or storage server with backup exec and some agents and an LTO 4 autoloader will certainly give you much more data resiliency than a replicating SAN. I understand your worries about a SAN being a single point of failure but providing its attached to decent UPS and is using raid 6, 10 or 50 then i wouldn't be to concerned.

I see where you are comming from, but replicating SAN just seems a little overkill for a small business where the money maybe better spend on a single decent SAN with a good onsite hardware warrenty and RAID level. I mean if you have a flood or fire your gunna lose your severs as well unless you have these spead across buildings? D2D2T might provide prove cheaper than a second SAN as well.

Would it most make sense to pony up the extra and go VSphere advanced or enterprise if you plan on storing the VM's on a SAN?

I've had more problems myself with the old emacs than i have ever had with with any of the imacs, and considering our imacs, and i suspect a large majority of macs in education are used for reasonably heavy video/ image work i would expect them to have a higher failure rate than the run of the mill desktop. That said perhaps i've just been fortunate.

I have the instructions RM send me on how to remove a CC3 replica DC i will PM you them on Monday. Its quite straightforward there isnt alot RM specfic stuff that needs to be removed or modified if i remember rightly.

Given up with easylink, RM are working on some new stuff with citrix to replace it and i'm looking at other solutions currently.

Bring on HTML 5, this should ease the need for web developers to turn to flash, shockwave etc for much of the web 2.0 type stuff that is all the rage now.

Great stuff, now how about an msi? God knows why they are so anal about the licencing for it as i wouldn't give their software away. Such great fun i've had with getting older and newer versions of this software to play nicely together on the same machine.

Also got the watchguard firebox series of SSL VPN's, not sure what they are like but i'm hoping to get a trial unit shortly.

Testbase, Exampro, Multimedia Science School, Just Click E-Science, the list goes on. Alot of the naff stuff i get usually comes free with ........... insert name of Exam Board textbook. Theirs alot of 'professional' software which can be just as bad when not alot of thought is put into how it can be deployed, or run by users which otherwise dont have admin access to the machine.

This can occur for a number of reasons, the most likely being if you are trying to build or allocate out to many packages to a large number of machines at a time. Or if the packages are naff. i.e lots of old packages created using the application wizard or are missing dependancies.

You can, change the keyboard out for one of the bigger wired ones for no extra cost so i dont think thats a problem. That 27inch imac does look amazing and my macbook pro is looking a little shoddy.. couple of hundred quid less for the quiad core version and 3 year applecare chucked in and i may have parted with some money. Would be feeling pretty gutted if i had only just got an imac though.

The upgrade process from CC3 to CC4 isnt has problematic as it was but a clean install is preferable. Both the upgrade from CC3 to CC4 and CC3 to vanilla require planning and preperation. It sounds like you would be better getting your LEA or a firm into to help to setup and customise a 2008 setup, but running a test setup with a couple of old machines or some vm's would be a good way to learn.

QNAP Systems, Inc. ( TS-809U-RP Turbo NAS ) - Quality Network Appliance Provider also worth a look if money is really tight. Could also look at building your own and use sanmelody open filer etc. Also got iSCSI IP-SAN Storage Servers which is with looks very good value for money.

And you think that the average building contractor will be around for 25 to 30 years? Or at least with the same name

Forgot to say if you do go down the CC4 route be prepaired to startup each laptop at least 5 minutes before anyone wants to use them and dont expect to be able to assign packages or RM updates for that matter over the wireless, for that you will need to be patching them in. A decent managed wireless setup would also be preferable.