Dave_O

If you're spending £60K pa on PCs that, by my estimation, equates to about 200 PC per year. I assume you don't allow machines to go out of warranty. Here's a thought why not keep the machines for a couple of years beyond warranty and cut costs by 40%-60%? Our experience is that machines last up to 2 years beyond warranty (we take 5 years on PCs/laptops purchased in the last 3 years). That will reduce your refresh costs by around £20K! Interested in this vendor neutrality. What thin clients are you going for? How long are you expecting them to last? How long are the warranties on the thin clients? When you have this in place I would be interested in seeing it in action. If nothing else to restore my faith in this technology, which of you hadn't guessed already, is at rock bottom.

In the end you have to ask yourself (and you really do have to be honest here) is this an effective use of your school's money or would spending a third of the budget to get standard PCs laptops etc (to the same effect) and offering the remaining money to other areas of the school budget be a better way to go? If I was a governor at the school with that level of investment I would want some buy in from staff, not just IT staff trying to convince me, but general teaching staff who have tried the solution (yes for that level of expenditure I would expect that it had been extensively trialled) and can recommend it. And following a review of the implementation after I year if there were concerns I would sack the person who proposed the solution on the spot.

Think you'll find the energy saving is not as high as you imagine if you factor in the backend consumption. Life expectacy - we are still running dell 745s which are years out of warranty and are still good after 6 years and as I mention in my original post who wants an IT solution that lasts that long. Things will have moved on. Staff support time - we spend 0.4% of our time on fixing EU machines not a big cost saver. External use - yes it's good for that but why not just use a terminal server or Ericom? Hundereds of times cheaper. We use VMWare View for external access for staff and it's very good for that. If we need to make it available for students we'll just get an external connector terminal server license and use that. We use AppV and ThinApp and they cover some apps (definitely no all) and papercut. In short I am struggling to see the justification for spending this amount of money on a solution that has limited ROI and applicability

Out of 800 PCs and 200 laptops which range from Optiplex 745s to 390s and more recently the lenovo M72e, L420s each year we get 3-4 failures (mainly from the older machines which are out of warranty) ie approx 0.4% failure rate. Re-imaging using system center 2012. Some areas of school I havn't visited in 2-3 years. Hardly excessive management overheads.

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/thin-client-virtual-machines/68166-my-conclusions-vdi-other-things.html

TCO higher than buying a standard PC with a 5 year warranty so what is the justification? Are all the users external?

Contact BCSAT in Rotherham. They are just the best at remote access solutions for schools and have customers to prove it! :-)

Not sure if I am missing something here, but having read throught the "Managing Communications though SMS Gateway" document from Capita, it looks as if I have to maintain a list of contacts manually for DR purposes. Is this the case? I would have thought that given the vast resources at Capita's disposal this at least could be automated!

I am always right! Don't mistake confrontation for someone who questions. Arrogance is subjective, depending on perspective and personal understanding.

Yes Mr Peanuts I can confirm that we are experiencing the same issue.

Checked the machine two weeks later and the 25% has gone up to 38%. Does it improve over time?

With reference to this post. I was asked earlier to update on Capita's response to my original question. Their response was:- "Capita Case Ref: 1304-1182667 - 2354 Hi David, Thank you for your update. Apologies, my last email should have been: With regards to the above case reference number. I have confirmed that there are no technical reasons why you should not do an in-place upgrade of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 to 2012. However if there are any other products other than SIMS hosted on this SQL Instance/Server, then please could you ensure that they are also supported on Microsoft SQL Server 2012.

Got 24% on a 1.5Tb fileserver, was hoping for more. Obviously staff don't copy the things into different folders as much as I thought they did

Yes that would do it!! I don't normally see that amount of activity unless I am rebuilding a VM pool through the VMWare View broker! I do have to ask, why? If it's VMware then possibly tools upgrade following patching. For Microsoft stuff I don't know is there an equivalent patch procedure. Or do you just like putting the systems through its paces!

Was that during a backup routine?

I have been using Veeam One over the last couple of days and remembered this thread. The attached image shows the Network usage from 7:40am to 2pm today Thursday. Just a normal day in toyland. Bear in mind this represents network usage across all virtual machines not just a few. Not sure what happened at 13:18 but even that only peaks at 60MBps. At that time there were 323 logged in users and it was the middle of a lesson so could be anything...

You ask any member of staff in school about me and ze vil be nice (or ze vil be punished!!) On a more serious note, thank you for the information.

In schools - 3 years primary teaching 18 years in secondary teaching, 2 year LA advisor (part time) and 8 year IT manager. As to you being the enemy, no, just misguided. As for the PS bit, why is this relevant to me? As you have surmised from your posts above we run SOLUS 3 on a different server. "but hey, don't let that little fact get in your way! After all you know everything!!" - finally you're beginning to see the light.

Paragraph 1 A few things "Yes, I have very limited understand of virtualisation" - not arguing with that one "This has two problems. One, it requires no-one else to be using the server as any changes would be lost." - why would I do an upgrade when there are people working on the box? Doing a side by side installation requires some down time while the dbs are moved. Even the junior schools we support understand that there are periods of discontinuity (we mainly do upgrades for them out of hours and by negotiation) " teachers have a 52 week contract " - term time is 39 weeks there are 3 half terms, 2 x 2 week breaks and a 6 week holiday. Paragraph 2 Mainly irrelevant to the original question but "You're response to my answer to b shows your lack of understanding at working at scale." - did 2nd line support for Oracle for 5 years Paragraph 3 Not sure where you're going with this? Paragraph 4 Again not sure what this is contributing to the original question other than offering a warning. I have posted a job with Capita and await their response. If they offer some coherent reasons not to do an in-place upgrade, I will be sure to post the response on this thread.

Interesting response. I take it you have a limited knowledge of virtualisation and in particular VMWare virtualisation. If we accept that limit then I think we can dispense with the inferred slights eluded to in this section. By the way the last time I restored from a snapshot was yesterday I am bemused by your second point. The only conclusion I can draw is that either you get the LA to do your SIMS upgrades and the nuances of SQL server and SIMS remain a black art to you or you work for an LA which is even more worrying. As to your third point, this is the reason for the post. I am merely trying to acertain if there are any technical reasons why an in place upgrade is not recommended. Your personal opinion about Microsofts credence is, I think, irrelevant. To your final point. Yes I'm sure you are very adept at editing a text file thank you for sharing that. As to your experiences of "dealt with too many faulty SQL installs" my heart goes out to you. In the absence of any sensible response I shall have to resort to contacting Capita directly.

Not sure what you're getting at here a) As I mentioned in my original post the machine was snapshot so rolling back to a state without 2012 takes just a few seconds no failed installs, no need for side by side installs etc (my "get out of jail free card" if you like) b) Why would you want to rename the instance? ours is called \SIMS and can stay that way no need to change connect.ini etc c) Possibly clean install might be better but, this is one of Microsoft 's flagship products so they would not be offering an upgrade path if they had not fully tested it.

Now stop me if I'm wrong but isn't the advice from Capita when upgrading, say from SQL 2008 to SQL 2012, is to install an instance of SQL 2012 (side by side) on the same box and then migrate using dbattach? Why not just upgrade the 2008 instance to 2012? I've done this on a snapped version of our SIMS box and it seem to work fine? Is there some reason why we shouldn't do it? Let me know Dave O VMWare consultant to the stars

2. Yes couldn't resist that one, especially when I note you are half a world away (or at least I hope you are!) 3. My way is the true way! You should know that from reading my other posts! Seriously though there is a lot of mis-information out there (especially from vendors) about what is needed in a school scenario. What I don't want is schools spending an inordinate amount money on a solution that is totally over spec'ed and unnecessary and not fit for purpose. Hence my constant rants about VDI

1. OK lets set up real world test that we can use for other people to try and share the information. How about we have a video file that is made available to students in a group lets say a group of 20 in a class that they all play simultaneously 10 minutes into the lesson to avoid login and logout profile issues. It's a bit of a rough figure but it will give an indication of peoples systems in a real world sense. We collect information on the % bandwidth usage of each of the ports used by the switch(es) directly servicing the ESX servers (in with other normal school traffic) and the IOPS of the storage (if you can). Then rather than talking about it and dismissing specific examples we have some hard facts (across a number of school) that actually mean something. 2. See below. I'm not sure how long you have been working in a school and with virtualisation and also what collected date you are basing your conclusions on (I'm sure your "theoretical" propositions have some basis in fact) but I would suggest you information bears little resemblance to reality. 3. You really need think about the context in which you are offering these scenarios. Schools do not have tens of thousands of users logging in simultaneously, there are probably 3-400 maximum at any one time. You just don't need massive network or storage bandwidth to service this number of concurrent users. Again if you have evidence to the contrary then please share it.

I stand corrected 10GbE