Katy

+1 for the HPE kit - iLO Advanced is well worth the price, think it was about £60 per server from Dave? Can't remember, definitely "okay I'd be stupid not to" kinda price. HTML5 remote console and remote power control.

We use FreshDesk - replacing a shared mailbox, then Spiceworks, then osticket, then a bespoke system I wrote... wouldn't go back, it isn't cheap if you want things like customised portal etc but worth it IMO. When pricing it up I did ponder over the price for a while but then compared what various departments are paying for web based stuff that is barely used, take into account how often we'd use it (all day every day) and it was a much easier decision.

Yep - can't wait for the next season, unfortunately delayed because of COVID

Thanks I might do over Xmas if I get time, although my setup is slightly different as there's no SSD in the S2D pool (long story short, on my DL360's with the large form factor drives, the SSDs sit in one of the expansion bays but connect straight into the motherboard rather than via a hotswap backplane, S2D refused to touch them because of this) - still works well enough as a cluster with replicated storage, and pulling the power on one host, everything restarts on the other fine.

Didn't use any RAID, the SSDs only have the hypervisor on them and we have two nodes which can each run the full load. S2D handles the disk resilience by allocating a spare disk and mirroring all data to the other node in the cluster.

We just replaced our 3 host + SAN VMWare cluster with 2 x HP DL360 g9 (dual 12 core Xeon, 144GB RAM) from ICT Direct, we weren't using SSD (went for 4 x 4TB SAS plus 2 x 200GB SSD) but all in cost us about £2k per server with the 3 year warranty. Not worth the extra it'd have cost to get that spec new just for an extra 2 years on the warranty. @BKGarry did something similar but with SSDs I think which puts the cost up but not by a lot. We set them up as a hyper-converged Hyper-V cluster so presented the disks as just basic disks to the OS which then took care of keeping one as a spare, and mirrors the data over to the other host too.

This reminds me of what a friend said when asked why they had no face mask - "I'm exempt from having a face" - and forgot the word "covering"

Ah yes that was it - if you use Gen 1 you have to faff about with a legacy adapter and it does the "standard" PXE boot ("Press F12"), if you use Gen 2 you use UEFI PXE boot ("Press Enter"). Been a while since I did the exam on that

Think you need a gen 1 VM with a legacy network card (different to a normal network card). Edit: Although no response sounds like you've got it to at least attempt PXE boot? What kind of virtual switch is it connected to? Mine are set as "External".

There are no licences, think it's a 1 year warranty and whatever free support you can get via email etc. - not sure entirely if they do any other support method as I've never had to use them. But for the price you can afford to keep a few spares on the shelf vs something expensive. Saying that we've not had a single AP or switch fail yet (100 APs, 6 switches) although only had them in a couple of years.

Yeah this is what I'm thinking assuming the projector supports this (it appears to do so, it has a single AV port (3.5mm jack) which will work as Video input or HDMI Audio output apparently). Going to test it in a classroom later on today into the existing classroom speakers. Cheers.

We need it to go via the display adapter ideally - the idea is they don't have to plug anything in at all, just connect and teach, so that's ruling out anything like a plugged in speaker. Although I suppose could use a bluetooth powered speaker, probably no way to make that as seamless as "win+k and pick your room number" (or stop the kids connecting and messing about).

We're testing them with a couple of teachers with a view to rolling these out across the site, one question I've just thought from feedback from one of the teachers is what do to regarding sound. Yeah it'll get output through the HDMI off the display adapter but then you're stuck with whatever the projector's built in speaker can handle. What does everyone else do to get around this? Presumably if there is an audio output on the projector just cable that into some powered speakers at the front of the class? (Please be an audio out on Casio Slim XJA142 as we have tons of them)

Cheers everyone. Probably gonna suggest a new machine around £1k mark, 32GB RAM, a 1660Ti or similar as the CPU is below the recommended spec and it means they can video edit at the same time as using the recording studio (they were only trying it in there cause their office PCs are 12 years old).

We've got a PC that music are trying to use to put some videos together with Premiere Pro, they're saying: "I am currently concerned that it will not be possible to create the Carol Service by the required deadline as the computer runs so slowly when using the software that tasks are taking about 5x longer than they should - 2 new PCs are required (one for drama productions and one for music). There is the possibility that we could refurbish the Recording Studio PC with new video card / processor etc. but I'm wary of just delaying inevitable issues." What spec PC are people generally using for video editing? This PC is: i5-6400 8GB RAM 250GB SSD and 1TB HDD Onboard graphics Presumably a graphics card would help it out? We built the PC to do audio recording so didn't put anything in for that. I'm not sure what spec they think they need as they've said "We need 2 new PCs @ £2500 each".... Actually just had a look on this Adobe Premiere Pro User Guide which says yes to a graphics card and maybe a bit more RAM. What graphics card would anyone recommend who is currently using Premiere Pro? Cheers

I don't see why RDS would be needed... they can just do it in the browser, MFA for added security - the only issue here is in the head of the governor who should not be giving operational instructions anyway as that's out of their remit.

Actually new question, can I do the same with VPP or can I only have one VPP token, or one MDM using the VPP?...

Well turns out it was easy, you can have multiple push certs and you can add multiple MDMs in School Manager, and then just move the device from one to the other. So far so good for testing. Next step is see if moving the device actually does anything besides change which MDM it looks at when it is reset.

We're going to be using InTune for Windows devices if/when we go 1:1 so was hoping to do it all in one place. We don't really use wallpapers or app layouts though so should do what we need (which is basically push apps, restrict a few bits, and set the wifi and trusted certificates)

Quick question - can I set up an MDM without breaking the existing MDM? As it needs the Apple Push certificates etc... Basically - we currently use Meraki (free up to 100 devices) for our 50-odd iPads, and I want to set up InTune and move a single iPad over to it, for testing etc, before eventually moving the lot over. But I don't want to break everything by doing so.

We have the rule where if everything is in the browser and you don't download everything, then you can use your own device it just needs to have AV etc on it. If you want to save data there's a complicated approval procedure with a big checklist for using your own device. I'd imagine GMail and Google Apps counts as "in the browser"? (We're 365 so we class Outlook Web and the Web versions of Word etc as permitted without the long procedure).

Yes - 100 is free, for device 101 you need to buy 101 licences. And they're not cheap. But we've got 50 of the things so it's fine for our needs.

We have a 53 camera Hikvision system on the main network (on its own VLAN) and it doesn't really make any impact on network performance at all. If it's an NVR (i.e. networked recorder) then it should have a web interface where you can watch live and playback. Our recorder lives in the server room and is only accessed remotely via the browser. In your situation if you don't/can't do that I'd probably put a PoE switch in where all the camera cables come back to, and connect that to the network on its own VLAN, then move the recorder elsewhere connected to the same VLAN.

Staff drive: We made a new set of folders called "Teams", with one subfolder per department. We then asked staff to put anything they wanted to keep within these folders. We then moved everything in these folders to individual teams (one per department) - as a team is just a sharepoint site we just dumped everything in the "General" folder/channel, then set the staff drive as read only for a year so they could access anything they'd forgotten. Some departments organised properly, others just copied everything from their old shared folder to the new one and retained the mess. Bit of resistance at first but when they realised they could access it from home without having to mess about with remote desktop they came around. We disabled remote desktop shortly after this (our MIS is web based so nothing left that they'd need RDP for). Once Covid and the lockdown appeared they'd been used to using Teams for just over a year so all went well. Student Drive: Migrated this in its entirety to a sharepoint site, access via the web browser. Not sure how much use the old drive ever got but the kids have got used to it. We used the Sharepoint Migration Tool to do the file lifting.

They're great aren't they, we replaced a HP system (pre-Aruba) with them, got 106 Unifi APs and the daily complaints from the HP kit dropped to zero when we switched over.