Spec me 4 servers....

[Peerzy]

Doing some work for 2 schools and they have 2x pretty naff old servers each from about 2003/2004. School has increased massively since they went in and they are falling over themselves.

1 will be for the ADMIN network (Vanilla) and the other is likely to have some sort of management software running it (RM etc...).

I may go vanilla for both networks but as one of the requirements for the pupil database on the ADMIN network the servers must be running 2008 R2.

Just looking to get some real rough ideas of what I should be looking at.

School A) Infant school so about 300~ users, only 30-40 computers (30 on the curriculum network, 5 on the ADMIN network).
School B) Junior school so about 400~ users, 100@ computers (10 on ADMIN, rest on curriculum)

Ideally I'd like the same setup on both sites and clear scope to grow, they need to last a minimum of 5 years.

What can people suggest/reccomend in terms of the actual server hardware so I can look at some rough pricing.

I'm aware if I go with RM/another management company they will do this for the curriculum side but ADMIN will still need to be specced by me etc...

Clients are all running WinXP at the moment, but will need to be Win7 in the next 12-18months.

Thanks

 

[Peerzy]

Yup has to be 2008 R2 and Win 7 has to come in within the next 18 months. Can easily see both schools doubling in size in terms of client machines in the next 5 years.

SAN, virtualization and VM's not needed as they don't have anyone to run anything like that on site. I'm ad-hoc support and do projects for them but long term they need to be able to leave the system alone and let it run by itself with minimal maintenance.

ADMIN server needs to run SIMS which uses Mysql (Surrey CC deal with all that though), and just 10 or so users at both sites using standard AD stuff. A coupel of shares, the servers they currently have use 500GB discs which is more than enough.

They have no set a budget (this is what my initial investigation is to do).

I obviously need something uber reliable, 500GB would be enough for data/user areas and shares on each server - I want a backup solution built in though. Other than that I don't know what to be looking for in terms of CPU's, RAM etc.....

 

[Peerzy]

Having something reliable and having working backups isn't compatible with being able to leave the system alone and run itself I'm afraid - patches will need to be approved, you'll need to do test restores to actually check that the backups work etc.

They might not have the staff on-site to keep it running but at least get them into some sort of agreement where you or one of your staff connects over a VPN once a week or so to check everything is still OK.

This is already in place with myself and Surrey CC offer ad-hoc phone/VPN support.

 

[Peerzy]

First step, get the whole idea of admin and curric networks out of your head, it's an incredibly old fashioned way of doing things, not one school i know of does it this way any more. If needs be just use vlans and split them into separate sites, certainly no need for two networks though (my place of work was this way when i started 6 years ago)

To be honest it's never going to be as simple as recommending you a bunch of server hardware, to do it properly you've got a load of in depth planning for something like this. The most i could say with the information you've given so far is that i'd recommend HP DL360s for a school environment but that's about as far as i could go, as for actual spec that needs lots more thought.

At the moment you have a network based around year 2000 infrastructure ideas, i don't want to assume how much you do or don't know but from evidence i'd say you either want to spend a good bit of time getting yourself up to date, or ask a private (not a supplier!) consultant to help you.

Thanks - exactly the sort of posts I was looking for.

This is my first big project running myself so I'm more than open to using other peoples help and advice.

Funny you should say no schools have ADMIN and curriculum as a secondary school I do work for just had CC4, VM's, SAN the lot put in and went this way. Although the ADMIN is being virtualized into CC4 in a few months.

I was looking at the HP ML350's as Towers would be much easier to fit in current server rooms. Are these similiar to the DL360s you suggest?

Where would you suggest to read up on/forums/sites to get a bit more clued up on this stuff.