Windows 8

Downloaded and installed Windows 8 onto one of our Slates.

I must say, very quick, much more than I thought it would be. Smooth animations. I'll have to stick it onto our domain to see how it fairs there.

Update:
I've decided to roll out Windows 8 out to our keyboard less ICONIA tablets.

Let's see how our kids react to them and see if they find them useful for their learning.

MAK limits

Had to contact Microsoft twice today, our Multiple Activation Keys for Windows 7 and Outlook 2010 hit their limit.

Outlook has been increased, just waiting on Windows now.

Mathletics

Promoted our pupil records in Mathletics today, just need info on group assignments, to put the kids in the right Math groups.

Well that works!

Today I am mainly finishing up on laptop installations, the ones I am doing today are for our SEN and IT Learning area.

Just before 9am our Fire Alarms were set off by the use of a vacuum cleaner, well, turns out it wasn't a vacuum cleaner and more of a "VAC"; dust from the refurbished ladies toilet went straight up the nozzle and out the vents; this causes a plume of dust triggering the sensors; at least we know the system works.

Multi-Media

I'm just re-installing our newly acquired Multi-Media machines.

These will be placed in our learning hub to be used for video editing and connected up with our Mechanical Lego, Robotics and other interactive kit.

These machines are:
Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Intel Core i5-2320 processors (3Ghz)
8 GB Ram
1 GB Dedicated NVidia GT610 Graphics card.
1 TB Hard Disk
21.5" HD ProLite Screens

Admin Day

Whilst the bulk of the End of Year procedures in preparation for the new year have been completed, I'm using this morning to finish off and re-check everything.

Our MIS system is ready for the new year.

Our Active Directory users have been promoted into their new OUs.

Exchange mailboxes have been generated.

Tomorrow I'll work on printing login labels and lists.

Our computer monitors arrived and our faulty laptop was collected.

NAPVS18 our pupil storage server had a hiccup today, it was up but didn't want to be seen. Do slight change to it's DNS and a reboot later, all is working.

Tested our new pupil logins to make sure their new profiles load as expected and save data on NAPVS18, and it did.

Loads more books have been added to our Library System thanks to several helpers. We look forward to seeing that in action on September.

More laptops

Today has been another day of installing laptops.

Our desktops arrived, but waiting on replacement screens as the ordered set are out of stock.

POE switches also pending delivery.

One of the new staff laptops that was faulty out of the box is due to be collected tomorrow.

Bulk install time

Today has been mainly installing our new laptops with Windows 7 Enterprise.

Thankfully it's pretty much automated these days, 16 done in a day.

Also time to unpack and setup our charging trolley.

I'll do it all again tomorrow for another 16.

Upgraded Moodle

While I was in the upgrading mood, I thought Moodle (our learning platform) could do with its update to bring it up to version number speed.

Audit Server Upgrade

I decided to re-install our Audit Server installation rather than migrate it.

The backup and restoration of data went well. Just under 2GB of audit data.

Migrate Horizon to Origin

After everything was checked to be okay, I started moving the VMs from VMServer (Horizon) to Origin.

I started with our Audit Server, but stopped it as it was going to be a weekend job to move that; so migrated our Terminal Server and SIMS servers.

Finally got those migrated by 7:30pm, although the last few hours was finishing up via remote at home. Better than watching a progress bar at work when I could be driving home.

The Audit Server remains.

Network Services

This morning it looks like the Network Services server had some issues with migration. It's overnight logs show that it's seeing the domain but not acting on it.

Re-attempting the migration again after checking the original still works.

Migration to Hyper-V

Today I have mainly been working on our migration from ESXi 5 to MS-Hyper-V.

Whilst I cannot fault ESXi, their recent pricing structure is outside of our budget, and MS-Hyper-V comes in quite nicely.

All the VMs from Origin have been transferred to Olympic - using a combination of VMware converter and vmdx2vhd.

I had slight trouble migrating our exchange 2003 server as the Hyper-V tools wouldn't complete their install., but persistence won the day. I had to convert a few times before it took.

All services were up and running by 3:15pm, not bad considering I walked through the door at 6:20am. I think I had lunch.

Tomorrow I will re-task Origin from ESXi 5 to Hyper-V, now that its been freed-up, and hopefully start migrating VMs from Horizon (VMServer) to it.

Rain doesn't stop play

While it may be pouring down outside, work in the school continues.

Although saying that, the guys developing the outside area are still working in those conditions.

4th Server Arrived

Our fourth server arrived late afternoon today.

It has been unpacked and placed in the rack cabinet.

Installation of services will start tomorrow.

WSUS

Our offline WSUS hard at work updating our new installs.

Building custom install

Apart from clearing out an office, I've been making a start on creating the custom Windows 7 CD/USB Install for our new laptops.

It took a while to get all the drivers sorted, but now the build CD has those pre-installed.

My next step will be to automate the Key insertion and activation.

These machines will have a custom login screen too.

Charging Trollies.

Our new Charging Trollies have arrived.

Time for recycling

56 cartridges to be sent off

Steps to combat Spam

Whilst we have not suffered tremendously with Spam, we do experience the odd one here and there.

However, to step up our fight against spam, especially in light of our new email users from September, we have added SpamHaus to our message filtering. This will crack down on known spam sending IPs and return then as undeliverable.

4th Server to join our family.

We look forward to bringing online this August our fourth server named "Olympic" in honour of the London 2012 Olympics, joining "Axiom", "Horizon" and "Origin".


This fourth server will run Hyper-V which will house our replacement Exchange 2003 with Exchange 2010.


Each Server is a 2 x Intel Xeon E5620 2.40Mhz, 24GB Ram, 1.8 TB Hdd, Raid 6, Intel system.
Axiom and Origin are running ESXi 5 vSphere, Horizon running VMWare Server


Over the course of August we hope to migrate the other 3 of our servers to Hyper-V.