ordeology

We did an in-place upgrade from 2008R2 on 5 of our SIMS servers a few years ago we initially cloned the VM's then tested in-place upgrades just did some sanity checks. We went 08R2 - 12R2 - 16 - 19... or we may have stopped at 16 I can't remember. It was a long process as it involved upgrading SQL as well. We did all this over the summer and basically said to everyone SIMS will be out for critical maintenance during this week so we blocked all access to SIMS for that week. We did a full backup initially and also took a snapshot carried out one OS upgrade, checked it, then the next OS upgrade, checked it and so on. We deleted the snapshots when we were happy and kept the initial full backup for a few months I think. There was no issues just took a long time to do 5 servers.

Although I no longer work in education, handling our SIMS servers was always a job I tried to give to someone else to do. They were a nightmare. We did a really crude calculation once for how much it costs per year for maintenance and unplanned downtime spent dealing with SIMS issues, I think it came to about £60,000 per year. I can't quite remember how we got to that figure as it was few years ago since I did it. I did present it to our COO as part of a draft business case to move to a cloud based provider. However the CEO was happy with SIMS and wasn't going to budge or even consider looking at alternatives.

This an interesting point and something I never took in to consideration when I redesigned our new server infrastructure for a MAT about 3 years ago. However one thing I did was reduce the footprint of our server infrastructure because over 7 years we inevitably had to buy more servers and storage to keep pace with growth so the before was 19 physical servers, 2 tape libraries 2 SANs. Then the new kit came in we reduced all of that to 6 servers and 2 SAN's, I left the Trust shortly after it was all finalised to pastures new. Now thinking about it I do hope in reducing the footprint the replacement kit at least bought in some energy savings.

I've had a similar problem, I found that the way Rufus creates the bootable ISO is not right for UEFI GPT so I used this method https://www.hyper-v.io/create-bootable-usb-windows-server-2019-installation/

I went serverless for two sites, all they had a server for was DC, and file storage... so when it came to server refresh we ripped them out. File storage had already mostly moved to OneDrive and authentication was provided by the two main sites where the main server infrastructure sat. It did mean they were reliant on the WAN connections but we had failover connections in place and, the main connections the only time we had outages was planned maintenance which was once in a blue moon out of hours. As for the Aruba switches I can't help we were a Cisco house.

I implemented Foldr in my previous place

I put a Biostore Fastrak system in the Trust I worked in previously and the system works really well, install was easy and went really smooth considering the switch over was doing during term time. Also used it as an opportunity to tidy up our biostore servers and biometric registration process.

If you have O365 why not create an MS Team? The backend of them is basically a Team SharePoint site. https://support.office.com/en-us/teams https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/education/deploy/set-up-teams-for-education When I worked for a MAT we had a SharePoint but no one took ownership of it and it quickly fell in to a state, we shifted departments and schools over to Teams and made life a lot easier for us in IT Support.

Yeah so it was a managed print contract direct with the manufacturer as we went all in with Konica. It was a cost per copy charge which covered maintenance, and the toner was self ordering so never really had to think about that. Only had to do a bit of work when a member of staff said toner is empty... Yes which colour and which copier? I can't remember what the cost per copy was mind you as I moved on from that place nearly 6 months ago.

Lenovo ThinkPad L390 Yoga? I deployed an earlier variant the 260 across the Trust I used to work for and went down quite well with most of the staff. It was light, touchscreen, didn't look to bad and had performance. Only problem was staff kept forgetting they had put a pen or something while they working then closed the lid and crushed the screen against it... (they weren't used to having laptops)

I had similar arguments before I left the trust for pastures new... I always put a stopper on new desktop laserjet printer requests only to get a message a couple of days later from C level saying can we order a desktop laserjet for this person. I did however make sure any new desktop laserjets were purchased through our print provider and if possible the lease length was adjusted to coincide with our main fleet.

Set the scene we were a trust and the school I worked at back then as a L1 technician had around 100 printers we then moved to a new BSF school and put in 8 Ricoh 45ppm MFP's purchased outright and had them for around 6 years. We then re-tendered as a trust and moved to Konica Minolta on a lease with 45ppm MFP's and then later asked them to put in PaperCut for us as well. We also defaulted everyone to mono and duplex.

Sounds like you need to work out strategic locations for MFP's and remove all the little printers and the inkjet multi functional devices. Yes staff will probably complain they have to walk down the corridor to release a print job so it will mean a culture change. It is so much easier to manage a few strategically placed MFP's than a wide range of inkjet multi functional devices, not to mention probably more cost effective. I was part of a project in on of my previous jobs which saw the cutting of a large number of little printers and replace them with MFP's in key locations. This worked well coupled together with a print management solution.

Hi We migrated to a new 2016 VM a few months ago back in Paxton were saying Net2 is unsupported on 2016 but they assisted us anyway and we can confirm it is all working fine. You can download the Paxton Net2 software from their website the only thing you will probably need support from them is transferring the license key over if you are using the pro version.

Fixed it... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2008-R2-and-2008/cc816624(v=ws.10) needed to enlist the RODC's in to the partition and all works as it shoud.