@Dashrender said:

@thecreativeone91 said:

Just talked to MS guys. We don't even need the VDA since they are for testing we can just use the MSDN Keys and not worry about licensing.

Assuming you already have a KMS server, you shouldn't need to do anything. The Windows 2008 R2 Server (maybe original 2008 as well) KMS key will authorize Windows 7.

Yeah the MDSN and MSVLSC are seperate. The Volume licensing is for production and the MSDN is for testing purposes only. Granted I don't think it matters too much what key is installed. We have both accounts.

@thecreativeone91 said:

@JaredBusch said:

@thecreativeone91 said:

That doesn't work when you have a lot of inbound rules as well as multiple Toll Free lines as well.

Sure it does. You just need an emergency IVR message stating there is a problem with the telephone provider and calls are being rerouted to a backup system. Then dump the calls to a few desginated emergency operators.

We have lines with a roll over agreement between to providers so we don't have to do that.

You're situation is a bit larger than most, so those agreements are definitely a good idea.

Our provider does allow us to designate a failover forward to phone number, so in the case where the SIP traffic can't register, it would auto failover.

I'm not recommending those specific values, just showing examples.

NFSv4 is only for security, typically you want to avoid this in a production virtualization environment. You would want to be on NFSv3 for performance reasons.

@Breffni-Potter said:

Hmm, at £0.32 pence an hour for

8GB Ram
Xeon E3-1270
Server 2012 R2
1TB Sata in Raid

For a server in Paris, looks really great

Very different offerings but Vultr has a similar server for $.12/hr which is a tiny fraction of that price. Just for comparison.

Not surprising. Would be a popular way to deploy.

@thecreativeone91 said:

Looks like it has a M.2 SSD plus a standard SATA HDD for mass storage is what I see.

Perfect, thank you.

I ordered one earlier, and then find out in a NewEgg video that opening the case voids your warranty. Super annoying. I have no use for a 7200 RPM drive or the power it consumes so would love to just pluck that out.

@dafyre said:

@Carnival-Boy Yes. But generally, that is negligible. I usually only notice it when doing installs of large software packages (in the several GB range).

And I believe that you can tune it to do larger leaps so that it is only taking the hit once rather than many smaller times.

I still have P4 Optiplexes running here.... so there ya go.

@g.jacobse said:

@thecreativeone91 said:

Too bad this doesn't work on windows 7.. https://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/p/designer-bluetooth-desktop

Looks like it will have to be a logitech unifying receiver. Odd there are so few full size bluetooh keyboards out given that the laptops have bluetooth.

I am not sure why it would not work with Windows 7. The BT Stack isn't that much different I don't believe. However, being that I am not a driver engineer, I do not know.

Microsoft themselves say it does not. And many reviews have tried it and it didn't work.

https://github.com/christian-korneck/get_win8key#files

@scottalanmiller said:

@garak0410 said:

My company isn't sold on subscription models, especially when Office 365 was going to run is 20K a year or so, so we just continue to get individual Office installs and just pay for Exchange Online only.

That's a confusing way to state that. Office 365 is the name of the subscription licensing scheme and Hosted Exchange is the most popular component of that.

It's that MS Office via Office 365 licensing was going to be $20K a year and that you are using Office 365 for Exchange only.

Right...sorry...if we were to have added Office to that, then, yes, 20K a year on average.

Found it. It was on a random SQL server.

I'm a fan of Brent Ozar http://www.brentozar.com/blog/ though my knowledge of SQL Server is very limited. He sounds like he knows what he's talking about but I wouldn't know if he does or not. I haven't paid for any of their training videos, but I've watched a few of the free ones.

Just got it installed on my MacBook Pro.

@creayt said:

You can transplant procs from one motherboard to another, right?

Yes, as long as the sockets are compatible.

@scottalanmiller said:

This is RAID 1. RAID 1 with a quintuple mirror. This would border on the crazy. Even with spinning rust, a standard RAID 1 (two way mirror) has a failure rate lower than 1/160,000 years. Each additional drive in the mirror takes that up orders of magnitude.

With the first option I was just mentioning an arbitrary, contrived example of another span configuration the controller would let me do in its Raid 10 config wizard in hopes that if there was a flaw in my 2-drives-per-span thinking someone would point it out to me. Everything you've said makes sense, thank you.

@Dashrender said:

Do you have any NICs in the expansion slots? I don't know if you can disable their booting ability, and even if you can, they probably still need to load something at boot time that is separate from the MB BIOS/UEFI.

I think it's just a single Intel 4 jack network daughter card and not in an expansion slot, I'll look into that, thanks.

@Reid-Cooper said:

I do not believe that turning off the virtualization capability of the processor via the BIOS will change the performance of the processor. My understanding of that ability to lock that down is simply that it is a security feature or a control feature, not a performance one.

That's helpful, thanks. I guess I'll leave it on.