Unraveling the datacenter one fibre at a time
This Saterday, we switched the subnet over, and moved all the remain criticle systems over to a new serverroom across the country. I didnt get to make as many pics as I liked, and no video, this was mainly cause I was so bussy of course. :D Half the pics below are curtesy of Arnold. Back of the Digital Alpha box, refernece sho for recabling. Packing up the servers in special locked crates. You could see these movers where the right stuff, big burly guys, but they handled the servers like feathers. ......
A tour of the current state of the office, and one of the server rooms, where most racks are now empty or near-empty. An Epic moment. Gert-Jan uninstalls Citrix on the last 2 servers in the farm, effectively ending 6 years of the 2000-user, 60-server Metaframe XP Citrix farm that served our Netherlands users. I would have had Marcel do this, but he has gone on holiday. Various IBM servers and almost all the blades lie ready to be moved to the new location. We don't have a use for any of these currently, ......
Spent today going over some cabling details mostly. Its strange how stressed we all became over these little details, while we will have larger issues to worry about on the day. (high res) During the move, we will be moving the Voip servers, RF-Controllers (used by various sites to do handheld-scanning), an Authentication server, the Wyse-Terminal (thin client) management server, and 1 PDC. We are also moving 2 very criticle FTP/EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) servers, that handle lots of customer-related ......
This is more or less how its gonna be. All the bits are now in place, half the rack stuff has been put in place already, the last stuff goes in coming Vriday. One of the biggest oversights we made was with power requirements. If you want redundant power for a lot of servers, you need to make sure you have a LOT of plugs, enough PDU’s, and plenty of PSU to back it all up. We didnt, partly due to time contraints, budget, but also short-sightedness, and my reliance on people that I, to put it bluntly, ......
So a few weeks ago, we spent our Saterday doing major recable work on the new Technical Computer room (TCR) in the new location, in preperation for our Big Bang services move coming up on the 5th of July (it was delayed from the 22nd)) So thise pics and videos are a few weeks old now, but who cares. PICTURES (scroll down for movies) Not enough room to neatly get all the fat KVM cables sorted, so later I actually extended the room for the cables to 2U, and used the cable guide rail only for ethernet ......
Youtube videos are worth a thousands words, so I will let them do the talking. Progress TCR Move May27 part 1 (the old location) Progress TCR Move May27 part 2 (the new location) What Mustafa thinks of IBM rackmount kits: And some pics from the last 3 days: (Click for larger versions) IBM xseries 336, bout 3 years old now ServeRAID 6M controller (in the PCI slot bay). Its IBM branded but its basically an Adaptec. This comes out of one of the 2 xseries 336 servers that, together with the EXP400 shelf, ......
For your enjoyment, here is a, slightly edited, email I just sent to the department head and various other decision makers. It goes over some of the options we need to consider to solve the current issues with our internet access. Names and places have been changed to protect the guilty ;) And please exuse the spelling. I was in a hurry and I really dont care about spelling as much as I do content. ---------------------------- Hi all, We are currently faced with some decisions that need to me made ......
So I havent posted about our Datacenter move in a while. Well we are starting to pick up the pace now, all the new servers at the new location have been set up, and various other teams are now installing their stuff on there. We are now getting into decomissioning more and more servers from the old server rooms. Here are two videos of rooms as they were 2 weeks ago. Old Datacenter 1 from Robert Kloosterhuis on Vimeo.(I focus on one of the comm pc’s for a while, as the mouse was moving just a minute ......
So here is something silly I was running up against. In the end its super simple, but its not obvious, and not easy to google for. I want to equip the new servers are are installing with a standard weekly reboot schedule. I created a batch file that launched shutdown.exe with some fancy parameters, and set this up as a scheduled task for each server. I created a special domain account called sa-scheduledreboot with normal user rights, and rights to access the share, and of course the famous "log ......
Picture on Flickr High-res version This is version 2 of the rack plan, as it currently stands. To make sure we have enough room for everything that could (potentially) be moved in, I moved things about a bit from where we are now, means we need to re-rack 2 servers tomorrow, but other than that we are good. I am really hoping we get to re-use the HP Storageworks tape library, I am not sure at the moment what type it is specifically. I also dont know yet how much room the Advocent Switchviews have ......
Full TCR Move 2008 Archive