dmj

IIRC it depends on the type of the license, retail licenses can be transferred to new owners but if they originated from a company it may be more complex. MS licensing is notoriously difficult.

Interestingly, vmware was one of the (fairly) early providers of kubernetes clusters for on-prem, their platform is Tanzu.Google, Rancher et al also provide on premise solutions. anyway, I digress. I get it in the neck if our servers aren't running at 70% load 95% of the time. There's a certain amount of irony that small schools are able to afford single servers capable of running 60 VM's, sitting idle most of the time - I'd never get away with that now. I fully take the point that small schools aren't going full container based soon, but a large MAT should be maximising their resources. Schools software is notoriously bad, but in this case it doesn't usually need to be re-worked to run in a container, just installed into a container. With modern gateways (as opposed to ingress) many would work just fine in containers I've repackaged several things over the years (automated pipelines, not doing it every install!). The most common issue is just poorly designed apps that wouldn't run in High Availability no matter what you tried. Usually they run, but as a "statefulset" in kubernetes so you get some of the benefits, but not all: if a node restarts it has to shutdown the master pod before the replacement is up (in a normal deployment the scheduler will build the replacement and then shutdown the pod) - thus no High Availability and you get x seconds downtime for the pod to reschedule. Plus in the worst case you also get no horizontal autoscaling which means you need to build the pod larger than it would be under little/no load. In these cases it's worth questioning the method if the app is that bad. Unfortunately, the companies that will invest into High Availability apps will prefer to sell the cloud platform as there's higher margins in it with fewer support costs. Remember the days when we started running VM's and all the big vendors, Capita et al refused to support virtual machines?It's the same difference, we just installed it anyway, learned how the technology worked and benefited from that. The eager young techs will follow the trends in IT - hopefully, for their sake, not staying too long in schools as I did.

100% this should in no way should be for IT to 'solve'. Teachers should be there to support students who email them questions, and I am sure most are happy to. Sanction the students for misappropriation of the system (as you would for staff who abuse it), but don't take away an important route for learning or pastoral support.

Yes, this. A kubernetes cluster to run the container images, there's very little overhead from each server and the applications scale horizontally across the cluster. This is what we run now, I also set up the same at a Uni I worked at - but never in a school.

1 VM per service was fairly sensible 10yrs ago but nowdays is just a massive waste of resources, especially if the VM is over provisioned in the first place to account for periods of high usage. I guess you can do some vertical scaling here, but it's probably still out of reach for single server schools. For sure, but some of the larger MAT's approach the size of mid-level universities, who absolutely do re-architect services and attempt to run them in efficient ways. I guess it's just one of those things that the more services you run the cheaper each service is.

Of course if you have a single server any redundancy will double the cost!

It's not typically double or triple for redundancy unless you are running really outdated applications, or only have a couple of servers. With containerised apps you typically run them in a cluster of servers with enough redundancy to cover one or two servers going down and enough to take peak loads (in cloud the servers will just provision themselves and scale to near zero with no traffic). It's not super expensive, the larger the org the cheaper it is. With only one or two servers on site it's double but if you already have 10 then you probably already have capacity to provide redundancy if the applications can transition their workloads correctly. Same with storage if you're clustering it across servers.

^ definitely this. We go further and have server maintenance automated, at any one point in the day I couldn't tell you how many servers are up or down. Load balancers and cluster management handle it all. Service uptime is all anyone cares about.

Using any of these? SMTP - 1980 DNS - 1983 Windows shares for file/print servers - 1983 BOOTP - 1988 Kerberos - 1993 DHCP - 1993 LDAP - 1993

a) Make the incumbent employee with those responsibilities a member of SLT and give them a pay rise b) Promote a teacher with no experience to do the job, and reduce the responsibilities of the current NM, thereby opening yourself up to claims of constructive dismissal. obviously most schools will choose b.

I should also mention there's some fairly intricate calculations involved for some services: for example, a network share can't have an SLO higher than it's constituent components - the network, the storage system and the service that serves the files. If the Network has 99.9% the storage server 99.0%, the storage system (SAN/NAS etc) 99.0% and the service itself has 99.0%, the total SLO for the network share would be (99.9% * 99% * 99% * 99% = 96.9% I think that's why the DfE have simplified it with 'servers' and 'storage' which sounds good on paper, but arguing that the servers met their SLO whilst the networks was down probably won't wash.

I think it's referring to Service Level Objectives (SLO), ie you set a realistic SLO and measure uptime. There's a good write up about this here Essentially, you pick a number that everyone is happy with; say 99.0% uptime during working hours over a month period. This means in a one month period of 160 working hours you have to be up for 158.4 hours. The other 1.5 hours can be used for maintenance or emergencies (hardware failure etc). If you don't think you can guarantee that then it can be adjusted. If management want higher uptimes they have to pay with hardware and out of hours support. It also means that if there is an emergency that eats up an hour or so, you can't plan working hours maintenance as you have already used the error budget.

Having similar thoughts myself. We put in Nest about 8 yrs ago and I've been happy with it up to now. My next project will be to build a Wifi7 Router that has home-assistant installed. It will probably be based on a BPI-R4. The idea would be to use home-assistant compatible radiator valves so that I can control the temperature per room to reduce costs.

You do this by with a group moderator in Google Land. https://support.google.com/groups/answer/2466386?hl=en

^^^^ This really. It's 100% a classroom issue. Raise it with SLT. We did some experiments with gluing them, but found it too easy to wreck the device in the process so gave up.

I immediately thought how forward thinking of them to use an AI with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to do this, but no - RAG = Red, Amber, Green in this context

The takeaway from this is to choose the one with the best documented API.

I wouldn't pay too much attention to the amount of swap space used. Pages aren't removed from swap/memory unless they are needed. It's probably been just been running a long while.

Usually the HT will get notified, but they probably have important things to do. Instead, there's a button on that page to "Get emails about this page" and it will let you know if there are statutory changes.

pretty sure "Learning Network Manager" was a MS product that they quietly dropped, or never released: /forums/downloads/1389-microsoft-learning-network-manager.html

pretty much as soon as GDPR became law our SLT chose to limit the data we collected. Email just got deleted after 12months, safeguarding data must be kept on a separate system, etc etc. It must have saved the school thousands of pounds over the last five years. If you don't have the data you don't have to report/redact it.

Surely that's Windows on ARM ? I've been running an ARM kubernetes server cluster (on linux) for a while. Instant 30% cost saving ontop of what's already much cheaper than running windows server. I think that's where the real impetus for ARM lies, in the server market and not the desktop - but the server market is where windows is also behind, so microsoft have a bigger potential marketshare to gain - if they get it right.

There's a container build for this if you're worried about reliability/failover; https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole

We had over 20,000 at a University I was working at. We just asked for more licenses and Google increased it the limit. Try again and perhaps escalate it through support or a rep if you have one.

Qnap business range looks good https://www.qnap.com/solution/qnap-zfs/en-us/