churchIT

Project Updates

Since it has been a while I just wanted to update my last post that listed our current projects with the progress that has and hasn’t been made.

We are now in the 2008-2009 budget year.  Due to us changing Internet providers we have reduced our budget needs for the current fiscal year.  The big project that we’ve received funds for is replacing Shelby with a new ChMS system!  (My early favorite is Shelby Arena but this is just my opinion without a team of staff talking to multiple vendors.)  This promises to be another busy year ahead of us!

We did finalize ISP bids and moved to Phonoscope from Data Foundry.

Microsoft Forefront Client Security tested well and we have migrated to the full product. This is not the easiest product to implement. I am hoping for big benefits in the future as this is further integrated with MOM and SCCM.

We have deployed Windows Server 2008 in a DC and File Server role and a Terminal Services Gateway.  Server 2008 is an excellent upgrade.

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, has been deployed but not fully utilized.

Still preparing for staff Office 2007 training.  I am very nervous about this deployment and all of the helpdesk calls because of the interface change.  Will look to do training after promotion Sunday in late August.

Prepared, tested and deployed new 8 core HP DL360 G5 for use as our third VMWare Server but now this server has Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 Server Core installed and is being setup as a member of a Microsoft Hyper-V cluster.

We’ll deploy Exchange 2007 after the Hyper-V cluster is operational.

After Exchange is virtualized, upgrade and re-purpose physical server as a Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 server to manage VMs and Hyper-V servers.

Virtual Iron

I had been planning on moving to ESX server from VMWare server for months but the $5000+ was a major stumbling block and made it harder to justify its ROI. I ran across a couple reviews of a server virtualization product named Virtual Iron a couple months ago. It is a competitor to VMWare ESX Server and other hypervisor based virtualization products. One review performed by Infoworld really caught my attention and prompted me to call their sales department for more information. I talked with a gentleman that went over the features of Virtual Iron. They offer some of the advanced features VMWare does like Snapshots, LiveMigrate and LiveCapacity and at 1/5 the price of VMWare. This looks like it could be a very compelling product and I have received the evaluation for their product so I will keep you posted on how that goes.

Virtualization

I have spent the last month virtualizing 4 servers. At this time, I am using VMware Server on Windows Server 2003 but I am monitoring this setup. So far I have not seen a pressing need to spend $4-6K per physical server for VMware Infrastructure.

To virtualize the first server I used VMware Converter to perform a P2V conversion. So far that server is working very well and I have had no problems with it, related to virtualization. Since that time I have created 3 new virtual servers that are now in production. Those servers are an Altiris Deployment Solution server (manages our HP Thin Clients), one running Service Desk Plus (Helpdesk Tickets), and one running Ricoh/Savin ScanRouter Software (Copier scanner to email). All of these servers perform as well virtualized as they did when installed on a physical box!

I am in the process of virtualizing our Main Campus print server, our Shelby/SQL server, and Windows SUS server. The printer server and WSUS servers should go into production next week. I am a bit worried about the performance of the Shelby/SQL server in a virtualized environment on a Windows VMware Server Host. I will be testing its performance extensively before deploying into the production environment. If SQL performs well and I can get my hands on another HP DL360 or DL380 server I will start evaluating Exchange 2007 with SP1. If the performance is not close to a physical server then I may look to VMware Infrastructure much sooner than planned.

I'll keep you posted on the progress.

Forced to Virtualize

I got that phone call that no IT professional wants to get, on Saturday, a user logged in and a critical server is down. Unfortunately, the call wasn't completely unexpected. I had been having problems with this server for a couple weeks and neither the server vendor nor I could pinpoint the problem. At first, the server would reboot during backups, some of the time. Troubleshot the problem and came up with firmware updates for everything related to the storage system. That did not fix the problem. Thinking that it was storage related I moved the file shares from the internal direct attached RAID to our new EqualLogic iSCSI SAN. Problem seemed to go away and it worked well for two weeks (while I was out for our baby's birth, it was a God thing! Praise the Lord!) but this last week it reared its ugly head again. I started getting iSCSI timeout errors during high I/O times and the server service would stop responding.

After I get the call, I VPN into the office and log into the problem server and find that logical disks residing on the SAN are missing and the iSCSI Initiator cannot connect to them. I tinker, restart and tinker some more, but I cannot reinitialize the iSCSI disks. I head into the office and after I cold boot, the iSCSI connections are back online. Since this server is our main campus AD Global Catalog, File and Print, DFS Root, and PKI I cannot afford any downtime during business hours so I decide to virtualize.

I created a new iSCSI target and point the VMWare Converter to the iSCSI target and about 25 minutes later I have a virtual machine. I shutdown the Physical Server and configure and start the new VM on a copy of VMWare Server that I just installed on my beefiest server. After lots of testing I must say that this Virtualization stuff is great! Especially since a physical server can be converted to a virtual server! By the way, this is the first time I've used virtualization in the server room but it really saved the day!

Now I will get this physical server repaired, upgrade the memory and make it a VMWare Host. I can now add redundancy and resiliency to the network via VMs and now adding hardware to the rack. This was a real blessing in disguise.