Ephelyon

Yes, we're using both with a heavy focus on Connect.

I've just e-mailed our Head to say "following our conversation yesterday, schoolnameacademy.org.uk has now been purchased as requested"... (We're not an Academy.) UPDATE: The Head has now replied saying "who asked for this to be purchased"...

If I'm honest, I'd far rather schools paid for a decent Internet connection at a teacher's home address than provide them with a laptop. As you rightly say, the endpoint is only as good as its connection back to the system!

@dry, I know the feeling. I'm operating an Honesty Policy with staff at the moment when they ask why their 8-year-old desktop is so slow... money. My hope is that eventually enough people will whinge - perhaps then I could virtualise the whinging and treat it as an aggregate resource across multiple whingers? Back on topic, a VDI setup of this nature is excessive for the school's needs I think, though doing something similar with a beefy RDS VM could achieve similar goals. I outlined a setup that might work equally well for you here earlier today.

Very nice Is there an ETA on that?

@ICTDirect_Dave, to be honest, the way the budget's going over here, I might be tempted... Would it be possible to get more of your components inventory on the website then? It only shows the 72GB and 146GB options, so I wasn't able to get a realistic idea of pricing from the site alone (which would be handy).

I'd get two decent refurb boxes from @ICTDirect_Dave and virtualise with Hyper-V. E.g. HP SE316M1 G6 with 2 x hexacore X5650, 48GB RAM and 8 x 146GB SAS disks. That gives 12 cores and 1TB storage per host (in RAID5) and comes out at £800 each. Set up Hyper-V Replica from the primary to the secondary host. VMs on the primary host: * DC/DNS/DHCP - 1 core / 4GB RAM * File - 1 core / 4GB RAM * Print - 1 core / 4GB RAM * MIS - variable, ours has 4 cores and 16GB RAM but you're unlikely to need that * Web if needed - variable depending on services hosted * Mail if needed - variable depending on e-mail solution * Misc if needed - for things like WDS, KMS, any random educational software wanting a server component, e.g. Sibelius licensing server... say 2 cores / 8GB RAM You've got cores and RAM to spare there, for future expansion. VMs on the secondary host: * Remote Access server (RDS) - say 8 cores / 32GB RAM during normal use * Sandbox VMs from the primary host Set up Hyper-V Replica from the primary to the secondary host, running every 15 minutes. The secondary host should ideally be in a different building or on the other side of the site, with a decent connection back to the core/server switches. That gives you redundancy in the event of losing the server room / a building, plus very decent speed of remote access for staff (if you don't already have that). The idea is that the secondary host isn't doing anything most of the time, so most of its resources can be used to run the remote access server, with the rest allowing for a bit of a sandbox environment for testing e.g. software upgrades on the primary VMs (suspending replication while doing so). All for £1,600! Before licensing, that is... so you'd be looking at maybe 4 x Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard licenses to cover up to 8 VMs with the above setup (replicas don't need licensing as long as you have Software Assurance). Check with your EES supplier for details on that. With all the extra financial room you have, I'd then start investigating options for a backup server running e.g. Veeam. We use a reverse-incremental disk-to-disk strategy stretching back up to a year to complement the on-site replicas (and off-site replicas in our case, but that's going a bit far at this stage).

In so precise a context? Nope. Not a clue. We use Parago Asset Manager but it's not always updated and I don't believe it stores any of the information in your five points above. EDIT: We do have an initial purchase/replacement price for all or most things.

@GrumbleDook, if I throw our solution (off-site to another school three miles away over PSN) into the mix here, is that going to muddy the water or could it be useful?

There's also the issue of "responsiveness" when accessing cloud-based VMs, depending on your connection speed/reliability. Upload/download bandwidth should include e.g. "if I want to upgrade to SQL Server 2014 I may need to upload the ISO for it, or download it from Microsoft on the server VM which is incoming bandwidth either way".

When our new Head joined us two years ago, I gave him this to summarise both where we've been and where I think we should be going. Kind of the opposite way round from your situation but the style of it may be relevant.Overview of Strategic ICT Developments at X School.docx

Stay array from me!

My job advert is just saying "ay"... We're not that Northern up here!

Dem women wiv dem memories...

@GrumbleDook, could well have been either of us. I know that's the precise argument as to why SSO for the MIS is not enabled on our site... On a side note, is the data on schools that have had to sign undertakings with the ICO on public record?

Another option for a converged solution would be the Stone Integrum.

Can I be the Senior Wrangler? xD

We're now recruiting for an ICT Technician who is also willing and able to get involved in the classroom to promote engagement with ICT facilities by both students and staff (the pay has been raised accordingly). Full details attached. Vacancy Link Addendum to the person spec: - Must be willing and able to work with @Ephelyon on a daily basis without going insane!

Hmmm, I'd say that's quite an archaic setup by modern standards, then. Are you in Cheshire, by any chance?

Probably some kind of curriculum/admin split. Do you have electronic registration there? Can you take a class register from a student PC if you needed to?

It definitely should not be remembering the last username - in my professional opinion anyway. That's a very easy setting to change, and in a school setup it's often one of the first things to be changed. It may be the case that your IT staff have not received adequate training on Group Policy. For example, the school may have moved from a system that heavily manages such settings for you using templates (there are a number of such offerings on the market), to a new setup that is more flexible but requires these things to be done manually. Your technical staff may be facing that issue; then again, incompetence is not off the cards from what I'm hearing... How long has this been the case at the school do you know? Are SLT aware and do they agree it is a hassle for staff (and students presumably)?

It sounds as if Group Policy Folder Redirection isn't configured, or isn't configured properly. Do other people experience a similar issue? If not, it might just be something not set up quite right for your account in particular. It's normal for your user profile to be loaded on logon and synced back at logoff, but documents ought to be stored centrally and not downloaded every time. The same applies to a number of other areas of a user profile, such as the AppData folder.

Uninstall/re-install Chrome at a lower update level - maybe grab this MSI?

Ideally you'd want to get Process Monitor on this kind of thing I think, but that's a significant analysis... :/

Tried clearing the User Data folder out of Local AppData as per our PMs?