garethEds

Your comments are interesting. Am I therefore better off purchasing: http://www.ict-direct.co.uk/servers?page=shop.product_details&flypage=vmj_estore.tpl&product_id=71&category_id=8 And fit in it 2 x 146 SCSI drives at 15K? If I mirror these in the same way? It's only 2 x dual core - will it be okay for simple servers being virtualised? I assume the 8 GB of ram will help. Gareth

Hi, From talking to our technician (who I'll ask to comment) - we installed the first CD to our network application area. I was annoyed that it didn't come as an MSI but onwards we went. The new licence server was installed and configured correctly. Using Impero we made sure every machine was on and then run the installation through the command line (which Impero allows us to do). It has gone on 20 machines in the library without any issues - except for the 'Upgrade issue'. Hope this helps, Gareth

I've just woken up to this. As an Apple Fanboy I'm gutted. May he rest in peace. He didn't even get to see his biography published (I wonder if they will bring that forward now whilst the attention is there) Bye Steve - thanks for everything - even if it did make me empty my wallet on numerous occasions. Gareth :-(

Well we have no funds for huge expensive systems so are going to purchase this http://www.ict-direct.co.uk/servers?page=shop.product_details&flypage=vmj_estore.tpl&product_id=58&category_id=8 from John and cut our virtualisation teeth with it. It is coming with rails and the hotplug bays - hopefully order tomorrow. It will do as we learn what we are doing. Gareth

EVening, Does anyone know (before I scan the registry in work tomorrow) what registry setting is changed to stop Sibelius 7 checking for updates on startup? Avid do not provide an MSI for this software so no transform. Gutted. Gareth

As users what can we do about this? I received Sib 7 today from them - no MSI. Can you believe it? No damn MSI for the network version. Just a command line. Luckily Impero will sort this for us and we can send it out. But why no MSI? Thanks. As for their upgrade policy - give Anne Robinson a ring. I'm tempted. GJE

Ohhhhhhh - that's not good. I'll monitor the situation when it happens. It will be the latest Sibelius version - 7. Ordered it the other day. No - my mistake. I know what you mean. So really is it not worth me mirroring the drives? What if I put the OS on one drive and the virtual machines on another drive? Then look at backup solutions? Or stick it all on one drive and get some backup software to back it up to the second drive? Or should I just bite the bullet and backup to a seperate NAS box? As you can guess I'm new to this virtual stuff. Our main fileserver gets backed up across the broadband network every night with the files being sent to LEA Towers. It's been a long time since I had to worry about AIT3/4 tape backups on our RM DCs :-) I thought about looking at the Zen stuff but the Physical to Virtual application costs some money (not sure how much). The heartbeat sounds interesting as well. Will research that tomorrow. Thanks for your reply, Gareth

IN the same boat here. I asked on another forum post what hardware people were using. Many replied but I almost fainted at some of the stuff. Where the heck to people get their cash from? Where do schools get their funds? So at the moment we are looking at getting a recon server from @ict-direct with two 500Gb drives in that we will mirror. We will install 2008R2 on there with the free VMWare ESXi software. I've already run the VMWare Converter on one of our servers and it took the image without any issues (it was a non critical server with three partitions). The servers we will be virtualising are not mission critical and will just hold SuccessMaker Enterprise, Sibelius License server, Impero. At the moment because we have an embarrassment of riches after leaving RM and going back to the LEA for our network. We've gone from 4 RM DC servers down to one fileserver and authentication across the broadband network to the central LEA DC servers. It works well. Our Leccy bill is huge as a school so I think pulling all the servers down into one will work for now. I may eventually get another server and virtualise our pCounter server - but this is in the thinking stage. I'll then sell our RM servers (which still work) - or will make up a super 32 bit server. I have no cash or funds in the central ICT budget :-) As for backing them up I'm going to rely on the mirroring that the server will have but will look at backing up somehow. [Edit: As a side note I'm interested in the mirroring of servers. If I bought two servers how would I have fall-over if one of them should die?] Gareth

An update to this - Stone now charge if the equipment doesn't work. If they can make money off it they will offset your charge against what they can make. I'd get in touch with them before putting a request through. Here is the text which explains it all: The Link: Stone Group IT Recycling Gareth

DOwnloaded 10.3 today - I wonder if anyone has issues upgrading from 10.2 to 10.3 via GPO update? I'ld move it to another forum but it seems apt to be here. Maybe the mods should move the whole post out of O/S Deployment. Gareth

Congratulations. Excellent news. Mine is 14 months old. Walking and very busy. Gareth

Ohhhh don't say that. Who else is out there? Who have I missed? John offered some excellent pricing I thought on the newer 7900 machines that had just come into stock. Gareth

Evening all, Just thought I'd pop back to close this thread and say we took delivery 50 reconditioned HP machines from John @ict-direct. The rather large lorry arrived with everything stacked neatly onto one pallet. Apart from the driver turning up during the lunch hour we managed to secure some staff to keep the kids away whilst we got the lorry in. The driver dropped the pallet outside the door where we opened it in place. We got 30 or so pupils to take the machines, mice and keyboards into the classroom where we then sorted them. Many hands...... etc. A row of 9 have been setup this afternoon with W7E and nothing has been DOA. So thanks John. Recommended supplier. Gareth

This is the clincher for me. Anytime Learning is important. As a secondary school we have to compete with the six form colleges in our area. They provide wireless to their students. We don't want to lose sixth formers so want to make our sixth form as attractive as possible. They will be able to access anywhere. Gareth

I don't think it will be a problem here. Staff/Pupils will be able to bring their own devices in. The LEA have set up a third domain which the laptops will connect to. Users will then be directed to a website portal where they will log in. They will then have access to the web through the LEA filtering system and access to their work and files through the Sharepoint Learning Gateway we have. Their laptops will not touch our curriculum network at all. It will work (I believe) like Caravan Club/coffee shop websites where you are directed to a web portal before being given the open access. The 'Guest' network will be subject to the same port filtering and website filtering as everyone else in the LEA broadband network. Gareth

We have this on our Windows 7 Enterprise machines. Users can go for days/weeks without any issues and then all of a sudden they log into a machine and are given full access to everything - it's as if they have become full machine/network admins. We got around it by rebuilding the machine. The issue went. Could it be something in the default user profile? Gareth

Maybe I phrased this wrong. Aruba are the LEA wireless network provider. They have setup the policies and provide the support for this wireless network. I can go elsewhere but we would not get the LEA support that comes with it. They also have excellent pricing for all the schools in the LEA. Apologies if I made it sound different, Gareth

Afternoon everyone, I'm currently putting together a case for installing a wireless network here at the school. Not a big one but something to start us off. We have to go with the LEA approved supplier (Aruba). I wonder if anyone has already gone before their SMT to provide a valid educational arguement for installing a wireless network. Would you be willing to share any notes/presentations you made? I'm currently researching the argument (there is no argument - it is something we need to do) - but I need to convince the SMT to spend during this time of no funds :-) Thanks Gareth

If it's Welsh it could be Torchwood. They exist. :-) Gareth

Hi - it's the storage arrays that worry me - I've never set one up - does it cover failure and backup? Gareth

Afternoon, Next year I am looking at consolidating our servers and want to virtualise. A huge gap in my personal knowledge here so I've started reading the VMware site and other related bits of information. We currently have around 8 servers with at least 3/4 of them being 1 server - 1 application. This needs to change. The servers are ageing and running 2003. So I want to move forward. From what I gather VMWare is the way forward - but what version? We would virtualise our servers first as they stand (how?) and then upgrade each one slowly to 2008R2. So questions are: 1. What is the ideal spec for my main virtual server? I've read that I don't need a host OS. 2. What spec hard drives? How would they be organised? How big? Any examples online that I can be pointed at? 3. Am I right in thinking their is a Physical to Virtual application out there that works with SCSI hard drives? What about servers with partitions? I'm sure there are more questions but they will come. Cheers in advance, Gareth

Evening Everyone, We are seeing a weird issue where MDT is not giving mahcines the correct name even though they are listed in the database with the name (and mac address). I have checked everything and cannot see where it is going wrong. When I look at the ID I can see the machine is named as something like MINIT *( I cannot remember what they were called) ANy ideas what else I should check? Gareth

As I started this thread I thought I would revisit it and say how we are getting on. At the end of last term the LEA announced it would be supporting Windows 7 SP1 in an official capacity from 1 September. They deemed it stable enough to put onto the LEA wide WAN. We had been messing and reporting back and one of the support guys there was doing some excellent work. So the weeks leading up to the holidays we played with MDT2010 and the technician @rbendle and I worked on getting a deployment in place ready for sending it out to certain rooms over the Summer. The main worry being the LEA were supporting W7Pro only and we were running Enterprise. Also the LEA didn't have a KMS server - but we did. We now have the only KMS server on the LEA network. Will be interesting to see what happens when other schools need one! We were happy with our image and got Office 2010 on there with a lot of other stuff. Driver provisioning all worked and we were happy. So @rbendle over a two week period installed W7Ent in 3 rooms. We then tested it when the kids came back and have not seen any issues. Of course we have tweaked during the week but are happy with it. Between now and XMas we aim to get the whole school transferred over. There we are. All done. Gareth

Evening, A big thanks to John Graham at ICT Direct (a forum sponsor) for quickly providing a quote yesterday for a large number of machines which we ordered today. Excellent service and machines arriving next week. Recycled machines is the way forward everyone. So thanks John @ictdirect. Gareth

Morning, I'm seeing an issue today where if I click on the 'Our Advertisers' forum: Our Advertisers then I am presented with a blank screen. Nothing appears. Cache cleared etc, all the usual trouble shooting done - but still the white screen. IE8 on Windows 7 Enterprise SP1 (32bit) Will try Firefox and report back. Gareth