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rookie_bFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Pc lab setup advice needed

Hello,

I need to set up a small lab - 1 server and 20 pcs and  have some questions about hardware and licensing. Here are the requirements:


20 PCs running Windows 7 Pro x86  (for domain membership)   and some  client software;
20 concurrent connections to server
1 server running Windows Server OS and some server applications
file and printer sharing
domain setup (I am guessing, since more than 10 pcs)
1 generic user account  

What Server edition should I choose? Will Foundation 2008 do?
What CAL count and type? What are the implications if there are 20 separate AD user accounts (will I need more CALs than if using 1 generic account on 20 PCs)
I am thinking about a second server for redundancy. Are there more appropriate redundancy options (NAS, RAID 0/5, etc)?
I am thinking about sourcing everything from Dell because of hassle free NBD warranty parts replacement service, although it does come at a premium.

THANK YOU!
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Greg Hejl
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Dell is a always my choice as their service is good enough, can just go for it, RAID 5 would be more safer as it will have min 3 HD, if 1 HD is down, then another HD will auto take over, will minimize the trouble for you.
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Thanks Greg,

Virtualization option seems interesting.

Do you think I might be able to save on licensing if I set up ESXi on both machines, only run 1 virtual server 2008 machine (or up to 4 according to Windows Server licensing on virtual machines), back up snapshots to the second server, which only runs ESXi, and if it fails, I just start the V machine from the snapshot on the second server. Does that make sense? If it does, what would be a recommended frequency (between once a day and once every 5 minutes) that would not affect performance (if it affects it at all)

Since the server will run server applications and not just data, is there a better replication solution that would go beyond AD and also replicate actual applications/services and data, and would kick in if the 1st server goes down?

Thanks!
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Unfortunately,we can't afford failover, within Server 2008 Enterprise/Datacente or third party like Neberfail and everRun. It will be a production environment, not a test lab. I was hoping that if I could keep regular snapshots and just restore to the second server that would do the trick, but if that is not advisable I am stuck.
if you have a second server you can do failover

Hi Greg,

This is turning into a different case, and I reaally should have split these from the beginning, so I am starting a new ticket for failover and would greatly appreciate your feedback on setting up failover, if you would have look.

Thank you so much for your input on this one.

Cheers!