Office move

oddjob62

oddjob62

oddjob62

Soldato
Joined
8 Nov 2002
Posts
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Location
NW London
Tomorrow is the big day, moving out of our old run down offices to a brand new open plan, all the bells and whistles office.

That means moving 250 users and 70 servers (onto a new nice and cleanly subnetted network unlike our one big class b network we have at the moment), configuring and testing our new phone system (although BT nicely cut off our line earlier this week because we didn't have our phone switch plugged in - cheers BT), and general chaos for the next 2-3 days.

Tonight i'm babysitting the backups to make sure they go though smoothly , the san holding our offsite backup to disk died on Monday, literally days after i'd finally set up DPM working nicely (a long time coming) so i've had a rush job moving back to the joy of backing up to tape.

Monday we were also informed that our leased line to our DR site is not going in for another 2 weeks (the previous friday there was no issue with it being delivered on time)

I'm hoping that all the bad luck is behind us and the move will go smoothly (ie no DOA servers tomorrow)

Fingers crossed.
 
70 servers to a new site with new ip addressing etc...

Rather you then me! :p

How many of you are doing it?
 
Wardie said:
250 users but 70 servers?!?!

Surely you don't mean 70 physical boxes?
Click to expand...

Not unheard off, we have a client who have relatively few users (around 600 or a little more if you include email only users) but are have around 180 servers deployed. They're a big (FTSE100) company financially, just with relatively few staff.

In fact they moved a year or so back but all their servers are 'cloud' based so sitting in datacenters, new fibre links went into the new building a couple of months in advance and they moved everything over a weekend, good to go on Monday morning...
 
Fair enough, I just thought it seemed a little strange.

Is there any reason for having that many servers? Given the whole green IT/virtualisation scene it just seemed like a lot of servers for the number of users.
 
Well it's 250 users in head office 350 overall and another 100 or so external users who access our internal databases.

Overall move went well, no DOAs, haven't slept much in the last 2 weeks and had no free time, but I now have about 9 lieu days to take :)

We have started virtualizing, but it's taking its time, lots of our systems are quite old and we are upgrading and migrating data manually making sure we can get support for everything before it is moved to virtual servers, and as i am the only one at this place who has the first clue on vmware, it's not something that's going to get done overnight
 
:)

Good to hear everything went well, I bet you were a little tense about it all. Legacy systems can always be troublesome :(
 
Wardie said:
Fair enough, I just thought it seemed a little strange.

Is there any reason for having that many servers? Given the whole green IT/virtualisation scene it just seemed like a lot of servers for the number of users.
Click to expand...

It all adds up, email alone accounts for 20+ servers between exchange front and back ends, OWA, BES and mail marshall at each of the two datacenters. Departments tend to like having their own databases so there's about 40 odd database servers split between SQL and Oracle, web front ends for database apps, document management is another chunk, file servers, about 12 AD servers for the various forests and business areas...

We don't do virtualisation in production for that client, development only. Given their performance requirements it's a decision I support and it won't change any time soon...
 
Good news today, swapped the DR SAN's SCSI controller out and it's all back up with there seems to be no data loss although have to check on Monday. Sighs of relief have been breathed.
 
Congrats on the smooth move, I always hate putting servers in vans. touchwood though they've always come back up so far!
 
I have to do 8 for 300 people on the 15th of December... not much, but for some reason my boss is having kittens over it...

Stelly
 
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