Best Practices For Infrastructure Upgrade? 264
An anonymous reader writes "I was put in charge of an aging IT infrastructure that needs a serious overhaul. Current services include the usual suspects, i.e. www, ftp, email, dns, firewall, DHCP — and some more. In most cases, each service runs on its own hardware, some of them for the last seven years straight. The machines still can (mostly) handle the load that ~150 people in multiple offices put on them, but there's hardly any fallback if any of the services die or an office is disconnected. Now, as the hardware must be replaced, I'd like to buff things up a bit: distributed instances of services (at least one instance per office) and a fallback/load-balancing scheme (either to an instance in another office or a duplicated one within the same). Services running on virtualized servers hosted by a single reasonably-sized machine per office (plus one for testing and a spare) seem to recommend themselves. What's you experience with virtualization of services and implementing fallback/load-balancing schemes? What's Best Practice for an update like this? I'm interested in your success stories and anecdotes, but also pointers and (book) references. Thanks!"
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
redundancy.
Re:Cloud Computing(TM) (Score:2, Funny)
I disagree when you have a budget of 800$ and some shoestrings it eliminates a lot of questions ;)
openVZ (Score:4, Funny)
For services running on linux, openVZ can be used as a jail with migration capabilities instead of a full on VM,
DISCLAIMER: I don't have a job so I've read about this but not used it in a pro environment yet
Google(tm) Cloud (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Trying to make your mark, eh? (Score:3, Funny)
To me a room full of dedicated machines each running a single simple thing due to the 1990s approach of replacing a server with a dozen shit windows boxes that can't handle much but are cheap screams "a dozen vunerable points of critical failure".
Even MS Windows has progressed to the point where you don't need a single machine per service anymore in a light duty situation. Machines are going to fail, you may be lucky and it could be after they have served their time and been sold off, but fans, power supplies or a pile of other components that will stop the machine delivering the service will fail someday. A couple of half decent machines with rendundant power supplies which will give you the option to have all of your services within a decent timeframe if one goes down is a far better option than a pile of critical points of failure depending on the reliability of $5 fans.
Such things are cheaper now than a roomfull of crap boxes.
Now if I was the story submitter I'd put together a plan to have a box or two that can take over any of those required services at short notice. Someday something will break, and it's better to have a box ready or a plan you can read at 2am instead of bumbling through. Of course, GuyFawkes would fire me for that while if he was doing it his way I'd simply try to talk him out of his NT3.51 philosophy. Where is he going to buy a WRT54 at 2am on a Sunday morning in 2015 anyway?
Insurance... (Score:4, Funny)
1) Buy a comprehensive insurance policy
2) Write a detailed implementation plan that you copied from a Google search
3) Wait the 3-6 months the plan calls out before actual "work" begins
4) Burn down the building using a homeless person as the schill
5) Submit an emergency "continuity" plan that you wanted to deploy all along
6) implement the new plan in one third the time of the original plan
7) come in under budget by 38.3%
8) hire a whole new help desk at half the budgeted payroll (52.7% savings)
9) speak at the board meeting: challenges you over came to saving the company
10) Graciously accept the position of CIO
(send all paychecks and bonuses to numbered bank account and retire to a non-extradition country) :)