Hello there. I am a technology coordinator here at a smaller sized private school. (180 students, about 40 staff).
We currently have 6 servers, one for exchange 2003, one as a file server, one as a quickbooks and file maker pro server, one as a our virus scanner and client computer problem finder ( esnet ), one that hosts spiceworks, one dhcp and print server.
They are all older xeon, dual core, 1.8-2.0 ghz, 4 gb of ram on most. All running server 2003.
Our server closet, is pretty much full, and the heat is becoming unable to manage. (we have an air conditioner in there going full time.) We are a school with 5+ year old software (the 2003 server OS and exchange 2k3), and we are unable to pass the current credit card security requirements.
My goal is to purchase one larger server (dual xeon quad with 32 GB of ram quoted for $5,000), have server 2008 r2 installed. Then P2V all of our servers into that much larger server and converting our exchange to 2007 on the way.
With the much more powerful server, and the release of duty of our other servers, I want try to extant the life of our old student laptops/computers by turning them into thin clients. With the ability to turn the smaller computers into a cluster with the larger server, I think this could be done with great success. With all the servers we will have over 12 completely free cores all around 2 ghz, and over 40 GB of ram.
I guess the question is, does anybody see why this is not going to be possible or any major hurdles I might be missing? Currently our school only has one single student account, that allows them to go anywhere in the server, messing with other students folders, and accidentally dragging folders into other folders. In order to stop this we would need to purchase 180 cals for each student to have a username and password?
It also seems that windows 7 really works well with the upgraded rdp 7 upgrade in server 2008. If I can get the thin client to work well enough, we will be able to upgrade all our xp machines to 7. (or will it be required that we go to 7 to make the thin client project successful?)
Thanks for any help or tips.
