DavR

@sparkeh that's really helpful, thank you. Who did you have that call open with, Office 365 support or Volume Licensing? I've repeatedly shared the link to their own FAQ about A1 Plus licensing, you'd think that would be enough for them to go and work it out, but really not. Getting anything done through MS support is always like pulling teeth.... without pliers.

Does anyone know the current best route to get A1 Plus licensing enabled in Office 365? We have the basic O365 A1, and some O365 ProPlus licensing from our OVS, on our tenant, it's my understanding that we should be able to combine this to get O365 A1 Plus. We should be eligible by my reading. I've tried O365 support, I've tried Volume Licensing support, and no-one seems to even understand the question. I've emailed [email protected] as suggested in this thread on the subject, but they didn't even reply. I'm not going mad am I? O365 A1 Plus is a real thing, isn't it? I read it on the Internet, it must be true.... I'm not even getting into the device based activation quagmire, I'm only really getting O365 up and running for people to use at home at this point.... Any pointers really appreciated!

Hi @Warwick_Tech - I'm afraid these went for scrap a few weeks ago.

I would advise just using the executable installer now, if you run it you can extract an MSI. More details over here. The powershell script I wrote was before the MSI version was available.

RAID10 would be nice, but in our budget range, a bit of a luxury. Plus I really do need to maximise storage space.... I'm at 1.8TB with backups already, 2TB would leave no wiggle room.

Haha, no, you're making perfect sense. I guess using the disk space directly rather than through a VM would be more pragmatic, and a better use of limited disk space, I was just getting into the spirit of the thing really, all the arguments I read tend to be along the lines not of "why would you virtualise", more "why wouldn't you?". Yes, the actual server in charge of running backups remains a VM, on a different server. I'd be interested to hear if any virtualisation purists have any arguments against using the space on the Hyper-V host as direct storage!

Oh yes, totally. That server exists purely for file storage for my Veeam backup files. I think it installs a Veeam agent on there too, but nothing too heavy.

Nothing to stop me using a different RAID config, but it wouldn't get me anything better due to the disks available. 3 x 500GB OS and 4 x 1TB for Data. Wouldn't have been my spec, I'd have gone for one big RAID 5/10 array with two partitions, but I can see where they were coming from. Both arrays are on the same controller, but yeah, it does add extra points of failure. Utilising the rest of the storage directly on the physical host is an idea, and would be the most space efficient I guess. It's a bit against the spirit of virtualisation though, shouldn't have anything bar the hypervisor running directly on the hardware and all that.

Hi all, well, them that are still reading despite the holidays! I'm doing some server jiggery over the break, converting a physical server into a Hyper-V host that will host 1 x Spare DC and 1 x Virtualised backup location, for resilience needs. Discussed here - http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-server-2012/207910-adding-physical-dc-2.html I'm trying to work out how to best use my space, without losing too much performance. I have available 1 x 1TB RAID5 array, and 1 x 2.7TB RAID5 array. My plan at the moment is: 1TB RAID5 100GB Hyper V host OS partition 900GB Hyper V guest storage partition, containing: [*=2]Spare DC full VM [*=2]Backup Host C drive [*=2]All VM config files 2.7TB RAID5 Backup Host D drive, aka, backup destination I know in an ideal world, you'd just have one big array containing all Hyper V disks and configs (and on RAID10 not 5), but this is the physical server I have available. The key point is to maximise the space available for backups on the backup location server. I've been reading around, but I can't find an argument one way or another about whether it's a bad idea to have VMs with disks on different arrays. It feels kinda untidy, but also seems a shame to use up valuable backup space on the second array when I've got spare capacity on the first. Alternatively I guess I could put the DC on the 1TB array and stick all of the Backup VM materials on the 2.7TB array, and expand that array sooner rather than later, but that would involve spending money.... Alternatively, is something like Storage Spaces an option, where I feed it my two arrays and it will give me all the space in one place? Or is that a recipe for failure... Any other Hyper V gotchas also welcome, I'm learning on the fly on this one (nothing new there...)!

Update - our site manager has had the flight cases and the batteries out of a bunch of these. Devices only now.

Just on the off chance anyone is still using these, I've got two full sets of ActiVote handsets I just found in a cupboard, each in a silver case of 32 each. PRM-AV3-01 x 64 PRM-AH2-01 X 2 I've been here four years, and I didn't know we had them til today. I doubt after the initial excitement they were used much, which seems to be the story throughout. One set of these even still has the "pull to release" battery tabs in, so have never been used. Such a waste of money and tech! Free to a good home, North London collection, or negotiate postage. If not taken, these will go in with the WEEE collection in a few weeks.

*bump* Summer 2020, and I've got even more VGA splitters to give away! Collection N London or negotiate postage.

We recently bought a new onsite system. We did look at the options of going hosted VOIP, but at a per month per handset charge, it was just extortionate. Instead we spent a couple of hundred on new onsite boxes, and reused existing handsets in most instances. The biggest outlay was engineer time from our phone guys. Hopefully going from ISDN to SIP over the holidays, if people pull their fingers out....

Yes, this is the interesting point. Last time contract came up for renewal, we got the offer to double our speed, but no cash savings. Interesting that you achieved a discount at the same time!

Happy to @JohnJackson, if you want to PM me your address. Like I said, it's great for those on lower speeds, but if they then get high speed for low speed money, it does risk upsetting people who are paying high speed money for the same speeds.

It does raise a serious point though. It's a great commitment to get schools up to these speeds at no extra costs, but, it does mean schools that invested sensibly earlier on will be paying more for the same service. We're a primary with a 200MB line, and are paying the 200MB cost. A primary paying for a 20MB line however gets a 100MB line for 20MB money. All admirable, but be nice if the costs for those already at the new minimum standard went down to match those who are getting the "free" upgrade.

Oh really? So I could run the hypervisor host, 1 x DC and 1 x Backup server, on one Server Standard license. Actually now you put it like that, this could work, and it's a little more elegant than just bashing the roles onto an existing physical host. The main hosts are running VMWare, but I'm not necessarily tied to WMWare, so this would give me a chance to evaluate Hyper V.... maybe I will trash the existing server and play with Hyper V over the holidays. Thanks for the tips so far everyone!

Well, if you were doing is correctly, you'd wipe the backup server and install it with ESXi OS, then add a VM for DC, and a VM for backup storage. Thinking about it, you'd probably need a hypervisor VM as well..... and Datacentre rather than Standard server licensing.... all of which I don't currently have the skillset for honestly. The more I dance around it, I think I'm just going to install the DC/DHCP roles on my existing backup storage server. Backups take no processing power during the day, and DCs take very little overnight when no-one's on the system, balances quite well actually!

You see, now if I was starting from scratch, I guess this is what I'd do. Set up the other physical server as a VM host (we're using VMWare but principal is the same), and then run a backup DC and the backup host server on it. I'm not killing off a working server if I don't have to though, plus that would mean additional licensing costs.

That was our exact situation in fact. We have a Dell VRTX, and the CMC card died. Restarted to try and recover it..... and the f***er wouldn't start up without it. As others have said 2012 R2 does full failover, we already have that working on two other DCs, this would be adding a third.

A systems design question for you on a Friday afternoon.... Our blade enclosure failed this week, which took down all of our VMs. We have redundancy in that the VMs are split over two servers in the enclosure, RAID on every disk etc, but the enclosure itself was a single point of failure. We're back up now after a hairy few days, but I'm wondering how best to avoid that single point of failure in future. I'm considering installing a physical DC, that would also have DHCP failover. The question is, whether to buy a new box for it, or whether I can just add those roles to an existing server. I have one physical server running Server 2012 R2, just for hosting backups right now. Now, I'm sure I considered doing this once before, but held back for reasons I don't remember. Is there any reason why I shouldn't install those roles on the backup host server? Can anyone recommend a micro server box to just run as a physical DC? Thanks in advance!

Every now and then, when I'm going through Baker Street on the tube, I can't help but run the sax solo through in my head. Immense tune!

Plus, if it's the .bat installer downloaded from the Minecraft EE website, it's not a silent install, where the MSI should be.

Interesting that Microsoft have been forced to backtrack from $%^ing appx files to just a normal installer. They must have got so many complaints. I wish I'd had this when I was hacking away trying to get our deployment working!

Yeah, we've already got Minecraft Education licensed through Azure AD. We're gaming it with User01, User02 etc at the moment, but if we ever had to implement that for core apps, it would be a nightmare. Not so bad if we went full Azure and abandoned local AD I suppose, but that's a paradigm shift from where we are currently.