Migrations

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We'll be getting our hardware early next week. Still no ETA on the storage we need to manage things.

Also, with Server 2008R2 being released on the 14th, that allows us to pick which OS we want to run. Microsoft just made it under the bar for us to consider that rev for fall quarter. Server 2008 R2 has a lot of new stuff in it, such as even more PowerShell (yes, it really is all that and a bag of chips) stuff, and PowerShell 2.0! "Printer Driver Isolation," should help minimize spooler faults, something I fear already even though I'm not running Windows Printing in production yet. Built in MPIO gets improvements as well, something that is very nice to have.

And yet... if we don't get it in time, we may not do it for the file serving cluster. Especially if pcounter doesn't work with the rebuilt printing paths for some reason. Won't know until we get stuff.

But once we get a delivery date for the storage pieces, we can start talking actual timelines beyond, "we hope to get it all done by fall start." Like, which weekends we'll need to block out to babysit the data migrations.

2 Comments

This entry brings up an interesting question. I take it from the terminology ("fall quarter") that you work at a university. How often do you re-engineer your infrastructure, or roll out new servers? Do yo align them to the school quarters? I'm interested in knowing how other people make decisions on roll-outs. We typically do a pretty informal survey of the machines' usage to see how things look and go from there, but I want to get it into a more formal process, rather than a "gee, do you think it's time yet?" thing.

You have in the past mention the need to support AFP for the macshow are you going to handle this with windows? I ask because there are no real great solutions this this problemOn linux you have netatalk but development on it has slowed to a practical halt. In addition It does not scale very well.On windows you have MacSeverIP and ExtemezIP however both these soulutions are extremely expensive on the scale you need.It is also noteable that the big NAS manufactures are not including AFP in their devices.Macs talking to windows file sever of CIFS can be done but the results ain't pretty