It seems that this is the year for big upgrades and changes. At work, we rolled out Exchange 2007 and all new network hardware earlier this year, and now we are preparing for a complete building rewiring in preparation for VOIP. This doesn’t include the myriad of side projects we are all working on.
At my side-job, where I moonlight as a hosting network admin, we are preparing to migrate most of our clients to Rackspace’s CloudSites. I was very pleased with Rackspace’s performance and options while testing. Compared to the competition, they offered the best options and easiest to manage system. It’s still growing but so far I am impressed. For $100 bucks a month, we can run most of our hosting network in the Cloud compared to the almost $900 a month spent on a beefy VMware server and dedicated CDP server. While the setup has worked out great, I don’t have as much time to babysit it, nor does the company have the cashflow to support it in this economy. It will also be nice for me to not have to worry about patching vulnerabilities, server updates, or spikes in traffic. I also really want to get away from Plesk. While I still like it compared to other control panels, there are just quirks about it that should have been fixed long ago, and it’s just another yearly cost in licensing. Of course, moving to the cloud has presented it’s own set of issues such as needing to overhaul our development process and environment, update old websites to work correctly in the new environment, and setup permanent solutions to old duck-taped ones. I will try to remember to post what I did when the dust settles.
Over the last few months I have been working in my spare time on a plan to upgrade the office server for said side-job company. The current server is about four years old and is beginning to show. The hardware is decent, but it’s still all patchwork on a shoe-string budget, i.e. enough to get by as a startup. It runs Small business Server 2003, but it’s had so many fixes and changes made to it that it’s a bear to manage anymore. Now that the company is hitting it’s stride (and then the market puked), it’s time to set them up with something a little more robust and make my life easier. We retired some of our Dell servers at work and put them up on auction, one of which I won. It’s a Dell Poweredge 2850 but with a couple upgrades and spare parts from a dead 2850, I was able to beef it up quite a bit. I also grabbed a DRAC (Dell Remote Access Card) off ebay for cheap to drop in so I finally have remote console ability (I’ve dreamed of this for years). I plan on installing Small Business Server 2008 along with upgrading an aging storage server install to Windows Home Server, with some tweaks. This is not only a performance upgrade, but it’s a clean slate with Exchange 2007 and Sharepoint built in that will be greatly welcomed.
I won’t actually be using the features of WHS other than it’s Drive Extender functionality for the office shared folders. It’s currently got a RAID10 for 4×250GB drives. It does well enough performance wise but the actual server itself is aging. If it’s in the cards later, I’d prefer they just move everything to a Drobo and be done with it (over Firewire) and retire this server. I’ve dropped a spare FW card into the Dell for just an occasion.
The next major upgrade piece is the firewall server. It’s had a few hiccups this last year so I want to remove it’s old harddrive and replace it with a CF>IDE combo. That should improve performance and reliability considerably. I will be dropping IPCop in favor of SmoothWall, mainly for the better control panel for traffic monitoring and OpenVPN addon. While they use MS VPN built into Windows, this only works if the office SBS server is up and running. Utilizing the OpenVPN setup, I can remote into the network independently and connect to the DRAC in the Dell to troubleshoot. I’ve already setup the entire office environment inside of VMWare here at home and it works really well.
All that remains is to get all of the desktops prepared and export everyone’s current Exchange account. We will be doing a completely clean install of the new system instead of a migration so we don’t bring over any old cruft. This should be interesting.