JRA

...Okay that's been a bit of a revelation! So, not meaning to ask stupid questions, but you need enough storage on each VM head to 'cope' with all the LUNs/VHDs of the guest VMs? That right? I'll try and find a guide for all this, it's quite new to me now! Seriously, thanks everyone!

...People do it WITHOUT SANs now? What is this wizardry?!?!

Hi again everyone - well I knocked up the attached picture. Does this look sane so far? Bonds are on the SAN (the big thing at the bottom, sorry didn't label this great) and the rest colour coded. This should allow me to add up to four heads to the SAN in this configuration. Is this getting sensible or madness? Next thing I need is how to set up a SAN from scratch. Been googling that but it's surprisingly difficult to get answers that 'speak' to me! Thanks everyone!

Thanks all - getting to grips with it again, dark memories were from another time where the old NM had CONSTANT issues with machines locking up, backups taking longer than the backup interval and never stopping... Swore I'd go with Linux and KVM next changce I got, which is all fine and dandy until you get *some* sort of error message, then you're legit on your own. Now going back to Hyper-V but I want to use three/four heads and a SAN. I'm fumbling my way through it here... Thanks again though everyone.

Thanks everyone! I think I might up the RAM and add a processor in that case, far simpler and cheaper. I would, but I've quite definitely lost my trust in almost all virtualisation - never had anything but issues with Hyper-V and KVM. Currently going back to Hyper-V over KVM as it's the lesser of two evils.

Hi all - bit new to this, trying to get my head around planning a move from an ancient old SIMS server to a shiny new one. Either that or upgrade what we have. Current server is an HP DL380p G8 with a single Xeon E5 (6 cores @ 2ghz) and 96gb RAM. If I upgrade that and add a second processor, do I have to re-license SQL? I'm not sure what's right to do tbh. Second (and least favourite option) is to replace the server. For doing that I guess the sane checklist is: - Buy server (oh yes.) - Install MSSQL - Move scheduled tasks etc over - Establish backups - Install extras eg Groupcall et al. If so, am I better off getting our LEA SIMS support team in to do the work, as I'm not feeling expert enough to undertake that? If I just need to be brave, SQL installation and licensing are the things that bother me currently - can anyone give me a potted guide on just what on earth Microsoft want form me? Thanks muchly for reading everyone.

Thanks for that! If they've already been created, how do we link the current account in SIMS with a personnel record? Cheers again.

Hi all - as IT we've never had to do this before, but a huge turnover of admin staff means the knowledge of this has been lost and it's fallen to me to discover. We've got most staff in SIMS who, when you find them in System Manager, have "Employee, User, Agent" in their SIMS Role(s). However, some staff only have "User" in there - these are usually agency staff if that;s any help. I'm wondering if anyone knows what needs to be filled in or ticked in SIMS for staff to get the other two roles? Thanks anyone!

Would it also be sane to have, say, 8x fiber nics in the SAN, 2x in each head and connect directly? Cheers much btw.

Thanks for that! I'll start installing the first head today. As for SAN and multipathing to it, what would anyone recommend? Is there even a SAN OS from Microsoft? If so, can I connect to it via two routes? As in, if I had five NICs on a head, two are teamed and go through switch 1, the other two are teamed and go through switch 2, both switches connect to the SAN. That sound right? Thanks!

Morning all, Well the time has come to ditch KVM (Linux virtualisation) for something that a normal human being can actually support. Given that I'm leaving a world of cryptic error messages and indecipherable issues, I'm looking for the least headaches possible in a Microsoft-based setup. My SAN (which I'd like to continue using) is a Synology NAS appliance, serves iSCSI LUNS, which I assume I can just create new VMs for in Hyper-V which will 'just work' when they boot, that right? If not, what new SAN OS should I get? I have a slightly older storage server I can use. I'll also be going for four heads to run the VMs. I intend to multipath them back to the SAN through two switches, does this work in Hyper-V? If you were setting this up anew today, what would be the absolute least hassle to get the most reliable solution? Thanks much everyone!

Hi all - anyone even use KVM on here? Have an odd one... On one head, I can migrate guests to it, but can't live migrate guests from it; have to pause them first. Error message appears saying either "Unable to migrate guest: internal error: owner -1 does not hold the resource lock" or complains it couldn't lock a particular iscsi target; though the iscsi target it complains of (which sometimes changes) isn't the one that belongs to that VM. I've also spotted that the dm number (eg dm-12) in the multipath device enumerator doesn't match the id of the device shown in multipath -ll across heads; eg 360014050cadca29d035dd3697d9e2ede will be dm-17 on one head, and 360014050cadca29d035dd3697d9e2ede is dm-6 on another. This is inconsistent across all heads. Whelp?

Hi everyone - thanks for those. I've tried to get it to follow the documents folder also, but not happening. I see the redirected version of the folder though in the local profile location, as well as the version in C:\Users\, which of course I'd like to be not there. Anyone see what I need to be doing?

Cheers - yes here it is: All of them manually set to this, not to "follow the documents folder" option. Samba (on the server fs1) takes care of the rest.

Hi all - thought I'd put this to bed years ago but looks like not. I've got this showing up for students: Does anyone know the right way to redirect folders in GP? I was sure this was fine, but why's it renaming them to 'homes' as well as sticking another version of Documents and Pictures etc in there? Urgh?? :/

Hi - yes now you mention it I'd think so! I browsed to it through the Save As dialogue box and the redirected My Documents 'thing' (where it replaces it with the redirected location) is there, but ALSO My Documents is there. Arrgh what on earth is it doing?? :/

Thanks to all the people who chipped in and helped. You've pointed me far enough towards the solution to get me working! I ended up writing a script that stuck the first two shortcuts up, then if the Office14 folder was there run one script, and the Office15 folder runs a different one from a couple of 'If' statements. Thanks again all.

Hi all, Just noticed my kids here can do this and I proper need to stop them! Opening up 2013 I can, as a student, elect to save to My Documents. I've enforced save locations in Group Policy from User > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Office 2013 > File Open/Save Dialogue Box > Restricted Browsing and yet the option to save to eg C:\Users\%username%\My Documents still exists and they can still save to it. Anyone know how to stop that going on? Thanks for any help!

Ta! I'll stuff that in. Well the site itself I'm not sure entirely needs that, but the remote desktop and portal sites etc do have ssl. I've got the wildcard cert so meh, might plumb it in. Thanks much to you both.

Hi all, We've had a new website developed for us by an external company. There seems to be an issue with fonts and icons not loading on initially visiting the website, which then go on to work when a link is clicked. The developers of the theme suggested that I redirect non-www traffic to www in Apache itself. After googling up just what on earth that meant, I've brewed up the following: [font=arial][/font] [font=arial] ServerName mysite.co[url="http://longhill.org.uk/"].[/url]uk[/font] [font=arial] Redirect permanent / [url="http://mysite.co.uk/"]http://www.mysite.co.uk/[/url][/font] [font=arial][/font] [font=arial] [/font] [font=arial][/font] [font=arial] ServerName [url="http://www.mysite.co.uk"]www.mysite.co.uk[/url][/font] [font=arial][/font] Will this achieve what I want to do or no? Thanks any and everyone!

Done! Worked a treat cheers. I have a feeling from this point there'll be no catch-all answers and I think they've been cack-handed at various stages now. I've checked them all for the above mistake and found the one account, but now I'll be plodding through each individually. Thanks everyone!

Gah, they've already logged in and it won't let me. Any way to do it or will it be new username?

Ah, now I have seen one of them in twice! When I've been to eg System Manager and tried to add a new user with the same name (just for an experiment) it's found the account that seems to be awkward PLUS one with the same name, which looks to be a member of the correct groups. Question is now, how do I un-marry the user account to the employee account, then marry it up to the correct account after? Thanks much all for the help though! Definitely getting there...

Hi - yes this section I did myself, but only this section. All users were matched when created rather than created entirely anew. There is only an email address in the contact details (section 5) of the ones going wrong. Oooerr, is that it?

Hi and thanks! Yes, new and old staff alike do.