Help...the ITs about to hit the fan

[RaveyDaveyUK]

Ok lads n lasses... I need your help!!

So one day I'm minding my own business... And then I'm put in charge of the companies servers!! The general opinion was "he plays games... He must know IT". Ummm... No.

We are only a small company with six staff, but we support 40 consultants.

We have 2 servers of mixed age, but let's say about 3-4years old. Let's call them server A and server B.

Server A runs SBS 2008 and hosts our exchange server and Data. A mix of exchange profiles, outlook and The DFS for documents etc. it contains 2x250gb drives and 2x500gb drives. Both are raid 1. It has 31gb left on the data drive partition!

Server B runs 2008 standard r2? and hosts our client management software and the DFS' second part. It has 3x146.8gb drives in raid 5 and has 80gb free.

So my problem is how to increase the drive space on the servers with minimal downtime and cost.

The exchange store is currently 188gb and has never been defragged!! I'm worried to even try it as I can't have any downtime. Anyone care to guess how long that would take. Can I stop n start it. I understand it has to be offline to defrag.

Will try and answer any questions, but truly am out of my depth here.

Local support firm said to either replace the lot or replace data drives on all servers. About £1500-2000. We just don't have that sort of budget. :/

Any advice greatly appreciated.

 

[badcompany]

Sub contract it.

 

[LostCorpse]

Sub contract it.

probably the right option tbh.


But its not just about expanding the drives to new capacity you also have to think about your back up. can your existing back up cope with the additional data? do you have a back up scheme in place? this is your first most important question. what do you do if it all goes wrong whats your fall back plan and position>

Honestly i'd probably be very reluctant to hand out much advice.

i know exchange can be very difficult some time. even for the experienced people.

i suggestion probably would to Virtual machine the lot to make it hardware independent, and then you can clone the set up and test things or even expand or change the hardware as needed with less hassle than having a physical box.

 

[#Chri5#]

How quickly is the Exchange IS (Information Store) growing? In other words, what sort of time frame do you have before you are really scraping the barrel for disk space? Exchange 2007 Back Pressure should stop you from totally running out of space but it will stop e-mail delivery.

In that 188GB, is there much whitespace? Look for Event ID 1221 in the Application Log, often around 5 or 6am each morning.

Next, as Emo_hug asks - what is your current backup plan? How many tapes, disks or other media do you rotate between? When was the last you tried to actually restore anything from a backup?

IMHO, you can't even begin to think about touching the data until you have a tried and tested backup plan in place.

What servers are they? What physical capacity do they have for more storage? If you could create another HD mirror with two new HDs, you could create new databases in Exchange and then move mailboxes from the existing DB to the new DB on the new array.

You may get the suggestion of removing one of the 500GB data drives, replacing it with a 1TB (or larger), then letting the array re-sync. Repeat for the other 500GB. Assuming the RAID controller supports expansion, you could then potentially expand the array, then the logical drive, finally the partition and have more space. It's also a very high risk plan IMHO.

One final wildcard - have a look at the Exchange Online plans. £2.60+VAT per user per months gets you 50GB per user. If you need a 3rd party to help you migrated your data then there would be additional cost but it solves your Exchange storage issue.

As a side note, I'm puzzled that 6 staff could generate 188GB of e-mail. Obviously if you include 40 consultants into that it's a lot more feasible, but in that case the IT budget should be whole lot bigger and not have somebody wincing at a quote of £2k (which isn't much of a solution to me).

 

[Quartz]

Lots of good stuff already mentioned. I'll particularly echo the backup/restore issue. I would beware the online stuff - bandwidth is expensive.

I too would tend to complete replacement: firstly, the equipment will have been depreciated anyway, and secondly, complete replacement means that if something goes wrong during the replacement process, you can just put the old servers back in. Further, this is Microsoft's recommended way of upgrading from SBS 2008 to WSE 2012. Read this Technet article. I'm guessing that this is way beyond your comfort zone, but at least it will give you a reference point when talking to subcontractors.

 

[covenantuk]

Seriously, politely decline to have anything to do with it unless they assign a proper budget. For most companies Exchange is a mission critical application - if somehow you lose it they'll be in to massive money to ask a company to come in blind and fix it and it's been known for companies to actually go under if they lose email for an extended period.

As mentioned above, either replace the hardware completely and migrate or find an outsourcing company to supply Exchange if they don't want their own IT department. Most comapnies will arrange migration for existing data as part of the deal.

If you must touch it limit yourself to maintenance and make sure it's backed up before you start:

As you mention Exchange has to be offline. A company that says "it can never come offline" is quite simply stupid. Planned maintenance windows are a fact of life for IT. You're right in saying it'll take a long time if it's never been done before, but get them to agree to a bank holiday weekend, kick it off on Thursday night and get them to pay you to babysit it all weekend. Before you try this make sure you do a health check on the hard disks though!

 

[RaveyDaveyUK]

Thanks all... a lot for me to take in.

It certainly isnt a job I want to take on single handed and would outsource... just didnt want to be taken for a ride.

I'm hoping the opportunity to replace sbs server will come up this financial year, but am worried about the here and now. 30gb doesnt seem a lot.

There is a lot of old reports and docs on the server and so hopefully archiving will reduce the immediate risk of a new consultant joining us and eating up the remaining space.

Back ups are handled by Cobian back up to 2 encrypted usb hard drives. Been like that since before I joined. Not great, but it works. I haven't tried a restore, but am told that the data is there if necs.. :/

I had looked at hosting exchange, but was unsure. Presumably we would need to improve our broadband for that? We currently have a bonded dsl connection.

Thaks for the Event 1221... I'll check that in a mo and see what it says.

Appreciate the help and will update thread at some point when things progress. Cheers all.

 

[a1ex2001]

the best form of learning for me has always been that that takes place under this sort of pressure situation. I learned more when exchange 5.5 broke and I got the job of fixing it than I did installing and running the exchange 2003 setup that replaced it!

Go carefully, ensure you have a good backup before you touch anything and double check everything!

 

[RimBlock]

Verify the backups you have are actually restorable before touching anything. Point out the risk of not doing this, everything going wrong and then finding out the backups are not viable.

From there you can start looking at the hardware options (what is the hardware you have, can you easily add more disks, what are the raid controllers, is the firmware up to date etc).

Decide on your plan, defrag, add a disk and rebuild the array (raid 5), replace disks with bigger enterprise disks in raid 1 (for the raid 1 drives). If you can have the current data drives and a new set in then you can potentially copy the data over and change drive letters to swap them over. Of course exchange will need to be down and there are probably a lot more 'gotchas' which others will be better placed to highlight on Exchange than me.

Can you not do the work over the weekend ?.

Do you not have a backup server to take over if the main server fails (hardware issue etc). If not then surely that would be your first matter of concern if downtime is unacceptible. Having a warm standby also means you could build it up with the new disks and verify it is working then switch over and upgrade the current one without very much downtime at all.

RB

 

[Quartz]

Local support firm said to either replace the lot or replace data drives on all servers. About £1500-2000. We just don't have that sort of budget. :/

Make a business case for the budget, and be prepared for the budget to be much larger. One of the ways to do this is to consider the cost of downtime (3 days minimum). Also point out how old the equipment is and that the chance of failure is now increasing. Further point out the utility of new technologies such as Branchcache.

 

[Caged]

Sit down and come up with a list of reasons why you absolutely have to run your own email server, then when you come up with no reasons at all sign up for Exchange Online Plan 1 and put a migration plan together. Email is too important to shove it on an out-of-warranty server on the end of a non-redundant internet link.

 

[Subliminal Aura]

Sit down and come up with a list of reasons why you absolutely have to run your own email server, then when you come up with no reasons at all sign up for Exchange Online Plan 1 and put a migration plan together. Email is too important to shove it on an out-of-warranty server on the end of a non-redundant internet link.

^^^ This

I don't know anyone who is mad enough to keep vital data onsite.

 

[edscdk]

1500 to 2000 including the extra drives? Take it... Don't touch it yourself. You would be looking at several hundred in drives alone. It's a massive job with that much data. Any solution you put it you will be blamed for if it does not work properly

 

[Quartz]

Sit down and come up with a list of reasons why you absolutely have to run your own email server,

Bandwidth and security are the big ones. Bandwidth is expensive.

Email is too important to shove it on an out-of-warranty server on the end of a non-redundant internet link.

Corporate email is business critical and should not be off-sited where it is subject to loss of service by some idiot in a digger.

 

[Caged]

Bandwidth and security are the big ones. Bandwidth is expensive.



Corporate email is business critical and should not be off-sited where it is subject to loss of service by some idiot in a digger.

Both of those are reasons to not have it sat in the corner of your office. A small company of six staff, what's more important - staff based in the office not being able to email each other, or staff based in the office not being able to communicate with anybody else? What's easier - six staff work from home whilst the phone line gets repaired, or moving the server somewhere else, updating MX records and hoping that everyone who was trying to get in touch with you re-sends their emails when they bounce?

Bandwidth is a non-issue because we are talking about email, a service that happily works over GPRS. And how much more secure do you think an on-site SBS box is compared to something in a Microsoft datacentre? What one has a USB port that a disgruntled employee can access?

 

[Quartz]

Bandwidth is a non-issue because we are talking about email, a service that happily works over GPRS.

But it's not just email. IME off-siting is fine for text messages and the like but not for multi-megabyte Powerpoint presentations, engineering drawings, and the like. Especially when you've got everything else flowing through the link as well.

As for security, how much do you really trust Microsoft? (Or Google or Yahoo or...) And the various security services? If you compete against an American company, do you really think your data will be safe when it's hosted outside your company? If you host it, they have to specifically break in, whereas they've likely cracked MS etc already.

But this is a business decision.

 

[Curio]

Ok lads n lasses... I need your help!!

So one day I'm minding my own business... And then I'm put in charge of the companies servers!! The general opinion was "he plays games... He must know IT". Ummm... No.

We are only a small company with six staff, but we support 40 consultants.

We have 2 servers of mixed age, but let's say about 3-4years old. Let's call them server A and server B.

Server A runs SBS 2008 and hosts our exchange server and Data. A mix of exchange profiles, outlook and The DFS for documents etc. it contains 2x250gb drives and 2x500gb drives. Both are raid 1. It has 31gb left on the data drive partition!

Server B runs 2008 standard r2? and hosts our client management software and the DFS' second part. It has 3x146.8gb drives in raid 5 and has 80gb free.

So my problem is how to increase the drive space on the servers with minimal downtime and cost.

The exchange store is currently 188gb and has never been defragged!! I'm worried to even try it as I can't have any downtime. Anyone care to guess how long that would take. Can I stop n start it. I understand it has to be offline to defrag.

Will try and answer any questions, but truly am out of my depth here.

Local support firm said to either replace the lot or replace data drives on all servers. About £1500-2000. We just don't have that sort of budget. :/

Any advice greatly appreciated.

As somebody who has been in a very similar position in a small company, be careful you don't out-source yourself out of a job! Is this now your primary position - or something you'll be doing alongside your regular work? I was stupid enough to find a company to help look after the server side of things (I was a 1 man IT dept who only did desktop support and inherited an old, messy server setup) and they soon pointed out to my company how much money they could save by canning me and letting them monitor/fix all the workstations remotely. That was me gone. Now I'm back at school learning all the stuff that would have saved my job!

 

[Quartz]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolo...ts-responsible-for-87pc-of-online-spying.html

 

[Caged]

But it's not just email. IME off-siting is fine for text messages and the like but not for multi-megabyte Powerpoint presentations, engineering drawings, and the like. Especially when you've got everything else flowing through the link as well.

As for security, how much do you really trust Microsoft? (Or Google or Yahoo or...) And the various security services? If you compete against an American company, do you really think your data will be safe when it's hosted outside your company? If you host it, they have to specifically break in, whereas they've likely cracked MS etc already.

But this is a business decision.

The bandwidth requirements for email are almost identical whether it's onsite or off-site, unless those large files that people are emailing around are being sent around between 6 office staff, at which point they should be using a local file share. Those big engineering drawings still have to get to your little SBS box, if your internet link can't cope then get a better on.

The NSA argument just makes you appear paranoid, sorry.. Hosting email on-site doesn't make it any less likely for your communications to be intercepted unless you're also encrypting your messages. Having physical control of your server doesn't outweigh the massive disadvantages that come with it being a single box sat in an open office on the sort of internet connection that a 6 person company would have.

 

[Quartz]

The bandwidth requirements for email are almost identical whether it's onsite or off-site,

This is not correct. A file transferred via a local mail server can be queued, whereas if you send or receive it directly, the user has to wait until the action is done.

unless those large files that people are emailing around are being sent around between 6 office staff, at which point they should be using a local file share.

I have worked in many companies and have always advocated this, but email can be much more convenient.

The NSA argument just makes you appear paranoid, sorry..

Pardon me for having worked in places where it is important. In particular, any company in the defence sector and any company with even indirect dealings with the Far East should take security very seriously indeed.