Willott

I would've said RAID10 - although having a Cached RAID card will provide some assistance with IOPs (to a certain point). If you're mainly using it for VMs, then RAID10 would be your best bet - go for as high random IOPs as you can get.

To be honest, having worked in supporting financial people, I'm suprised they stayed in consumer so long. Blackberry was and always has been an Enterprise device, the consumer side of things was not a good idea.

If you're just using as an iSCSI target, it would seem a waste of a Windows license and the GUI would add unneccessary load onto the server (where you really don't need a GUI). It may be worth looking at one of the Linux based storage distros which may use a web interface for control (much lower memory/HDD/CPU requirement than Windows). If you look to do Unified Storage as @localzuk suggests, then Windows Server (or Storage Server) may be the best way to go. Cheers Will

Thoughts: One RAID vol with multiple LUNs would allow each of your servers access to the highest possibly IOPs from the box - however, they could then be fighting over resources if both servers are hit hard at the same time. If you have 2 RAID vols, then you'll be guaranteeing the IOPs for each server (as long as the SAS and FC bits can handle it), but you'll get less maximum. It depends on how your data is structured above, and what sort of loads you see at logon and during lessons (does one server get hit hard, and the other have it easy, then they swap as different year groups are in and out of computer lessons, or do you have balanced usage across the 2). I'd probably lean towards to a single RAID10 to provide maximum possible IOPS, and then manage data at a LUN level to balance loads. As far as separating profiles and home dirs across LUNs/disks, I don't think I'd bother - your profiles will only really be hit at logon and logoff, so shouldn't be being used whilst the home dirs are (ie during a user session). Cheers Will

It looks like what you have there is storage server hardware... probably looking to use iSCSI to pass data to your Hyper-V hosts. Have you decided on what OS you're putting on the storage hardware? From the looks of it you'll be sticking the OS and the storage on the same array using the RAID card (does the Supermicro case have a SAS expander backplane, otherwise you may be SOL - your RAID card is 4 port only, so you'd need expander on backplane to allow connection to all drive bays), so that would limit the usability/usefulness of something like nexenta (which uses ZFS - similar to the Oracle ZFS 7xx0 units). Was that spec put together by a supplier, if so, ask them what OS they're planning for, it's a little difficult to guess from the spec, my guess would be windows server type, or possibly a linux distro. Cheers Will

If your windows updates include service packs are you then clearing out old service pack files (dism command)? Can sometimes clear out a few gig

Buy new - not only do you get more processing cores/power, it's likely to be better Watts per processing power, so you'll be reducing energy costs (for the number of equivalent machines), which is part of the wonder of virtualisation Also, your RAM is likely to be DDR3 in the new isn't it? Should be noticibly quicker. If you can afford, go bigger on RAM... you can easily overprovision CPU (most boxes for most of the time use a fraction of a single core, but you're limitting yourself with 32GB RAM (say ~16 Windows server 2008 instances at max per box... you've got 24 CPU cores...). I'd be tempted to get 2 of the servers, at least doubling the RAM, and try to combine RAM/CPUs from the R610s to give you a backup virtual box (how many R610s do you have?). I'd also agree with the above regarding SAN, but seem to remember something from your previous posts regarding getting one... as above, the beastly host solution only really makes sense if you can switch machines between the 2 (doesn't have to be in HA, unless your virtualisation platform that you've chosen includes that), otherwise you need beastly storage in both and some way of syncing the machines between the 2 Cheers Will

Pre welcome saying you can dial extension direct 1 - Absence 2 - Offices 3 - Reception Out of hours then has separate menu for (day/night mode set by receptionist): 1 - student absence 2 - staff absence Cheers Will

We're in Notts and using PBXiaF (PBX in a Flash) - if you want to come see, let me know. I'd previously done a Centos install, compiled asterisk and stuck freepbx on it, but PBXiaF is simpler - did take a little hacking to get it to install behind a proxy, but got there without too much difficulty. Doing it yourself is not bad. We use IAX2 for our trunks, and are paying ~£20 a month for 20 incoming concurrent calls (costs may have gone up for new users, but not beyond £4 per number which gives you 2 concurrent calls). We've cut our monthly bills in half (had 4 ISDN channels previously), and increased capacity massively (we can have as many concurrent outbound numbers as we like, so increased capacity whilst cutting cost). The only issue we've had recently has been some packet loss, but can't track where that's occuring. More of the ISPs are starting to give options of SIP trunks (Virgina and BT are from what I can see) so there may be ways of ensuring packet loss reduced by using your ISPs trunking - I'm also trying to persuade our RBC/LA to do some SIP/IAX2 to PSTN stuff. We may look to stick a second internet feed in specifically for the phone system (still cheaper than ISDN) and failover to our main net connection then failover to our single analogue PSTN line we have in reception for "emergencies". As we've had significant upstream network issues today, this is looking like a good idea (ADSL backup wouldn't have helped as issue is at ISP's routers many miles away). We have started using the yealink phones, and they're quite impressive for the price. Moving DDIs can be where it starts to get tricky. Who are your current lines with? Some companies are difficult to port from (we had to port out number from the provider we were with, to Virgin who were the people who originally held the number, who forwarded calls to a temporary number at our IAX2 provider), but most of the time, it's fairly straight forward. Call costs themselves are quite cheap, and we've got a couple of packages which mean we have relatively low costs. Any queries, I'll see if I can help. Cheers Will

"We" wouldn't see it anyway - it'd only be used carrier backbone (from other parts of the article) - so BT/Virgin's main fibre runs between the huge exchanges (if they decide to bother)... although, possibly used in JANET backbone done the line, which would improve overall capacity. I wonder if there's a max length on this - does the signal need repeating over certain distances, and if so, does the signal need to be read, error checked and then repackaged before retransmission. If not, would be a very good way to boost capacity across some of the major oceanic links, reducing bandwidth costs (which may in turn bring broadband costs down, and possibly reduce contention). Now, when are we going to start the Edugeek ISP?

I've got Macromedia Suite MX 2004 running on Server 2008R2 using Application Virtualization - if you've got SA rights on a microsoft agreement, it may be worth a look to get things working.

Gpresult definitely shows it's coming from default domain policy and not a loopback on a machine targetted ou/gpo?

You could place "enforce" on the downlevel policy

You can use CAT5E cabling in place of DMX for your long runs, just be careful to ensure you have decent termination (suggested IDC/punchdown). Cable characteristics meet DMX requirements, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than DMX. Main thing is to plan where you want fixtures, and your DMX boxes so that you can ensure expandability, but also ensure you can easily check for breaks in the chain. Will

One company I've recently heard about and looked into is MediaTemple and their grid service - need to do further research, but seem fairly good so far. The other thing to ensure with web hosts (shared hosting types) is that they separate SQL off their web hosts. I know our LA currently have a setup where websites are hosted on the same box as SQL, so when any load is on servers, php pages reliant on SQL content are slow to load, or fail altogether - for snow days, I put up a temporary HTML page which loads with no issues, with a link through to the main site. The issue with hosting web and sql on the same server is that the server is setup for "general" loads, ie mid amounts of RAM, okish hdds, setup in RAID5/6 or similar, so once you have more than a few sites, RAM is being eaten up and the disks aren't fast enough to service the SQL load. Dedicated SQL servers would have RAID10, 15k disks, and shed loads of RAM so can respond to queries quickly, and the web hosts then just get on with the job they're setup for... serving data over http/https (and ftp). Cheers Will

We use Gradwell (for IAX2 trunks - but they also do SIP). Not had a massive amount of issues.

Hi, Does anyone have any suggestions for something on the above lines - looking to get something which is accredited, but all the ones that out there are aimed at School Business Managers, or teaching staff. My boss has suggested DSBM, but is there something more IT related? Been looking at ITIL, but this seems to require doing several levels before you get to organizational structures and strategic planning cross organization. Educational background for me is a masters level, with decent A levels and GCSEs. I've recently seen a job description for the kind of level I'm aiming to reach, which has no mention of qualifications in this area, which seems to suggest it may be lacking - maybe a space for providers? Thanks for any help Will

You say they added in load balancing - they haven't as part of that restructured the IP range (ie there's a new load balanced IP)? Simple thing I know... but netsweeper and LEAs do the strangest things!

I've only just started VLANing our network, and have had VoIP on it a while with no issues of call quality due to network, no QoS enabled etc. We also have IAX2 trunks to an external provider who handle our PSTN connection. Until last week we've had no issues with this (out over 100Mb to POP, the 1Gb to DCs then multiple 1Gb to wider networks then to external provider's network), have just started seeing some issues on inbound call quality (lost or dropped packets) which I'm going through the process of trying to work out where the issue lies. But overall, have seen no issues with not much work done!

Anyone got any other feedback? Like how is the helpdesk for either of them, and how often do you have to call support? And @Soulfish - how big is your PSF DB - the system requirements suggest 500GB HDD space, but I can't ever see our DB hitting this size

Can't remember that aspect of things. Do you have an opinion or experience on either software?

Hi Guys, Need some opinions on the above 2 financial packages from users/techies supporting. We're on the process to become a multi-academy trust, so need reporting across the trust, as well as individual school security basis (ie bob in school1 only sees school1's accounts etc). We've had both in to demo their software, and unfortunately PS Financials didn't show the basics of what it can do - the finance staff are currently interested in how the software processes will differ from a view of purchase orders, invoices etc (ie the day to day stuff), rather than the indepth powerful reporting and tracing which was shown. We're off to see Corero again tomorrow, but I'd like to gather views outside of a Corero user group (I know that use groups can be created from the places which have no issue with the software). So, anyone who's used either of them, can I have your opinions. Any issues which took a while to resolve, any issues with parts of the software, anything missing, any strange configurations required, any comment on speed/flexibility, any comment on feature development/updates? Cheers Will

I forgot to respond to this, so apologies... 1) For large data rates, cabling type tends to be fibre optic - this is less susceptable to interference so the signal can go longer distances than copper based means (ie ADSL etc) and carry more data more readily. For a large secondary school, the minimum I would suggest is a 100Mb data rate, however it may be cost effective (and future proofing) to get a 1Gb (1 gigabit) bearer and purchase a "CDR" or capped rate on this - CDR in this sense is committed data rate - ie you commit to using a certain data rate (usually averaged and taken at 95% of your use - in legal terms CDR at the 95th percentile) but can burst above this - for example, you could commit to 30Mb, but be able to burst to 1Gb, as long as you don't use more than about 9TB data in a month (30Mb/8bits*secs*mins*hours*30days)... however this doesn't seem to be how they like to run ISP fibre connections - for this they tend to put a cap on your bandwidth (so you can only hit 30Mb for example) - this puts slightly less strain on the ISP's systems as they can plan for the data that they'll receive - burstable data is slightly more difficult to plan for. I'll do the second one later

Maybe add to the discussion how the school can make some more money - ie look at income streams so that you don't have to look to save money...

Pay freeze ends 2013, then 2 years of 1% pay rises from what I understand