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Best Practices For Infrastructure Upgrade?
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!"
If you have heard of Small Business Server, Microsoft just released a 3 server solution for businesses of your size called EBS. It will do everything you just outlined including setting the foundation for branch office scenarios with redundancy. With EBS, you get SharePoint, Exchange, Fax serving, AD, DNS, DHCP, firewall, FTP, IIS for web serving all included. Because it is built on Windows Server 2008, you get access to all the services that it provides. It will be a huge leap in user experience for your end-users and you'll finally stop fire fighting and actually allow time to deal with the real IT/Business challenges.
Rather than pushing the features, the real work you need to do is to identify business requirements and map them to features, implementation costs, and upkeep costs.
Once you have a sane, self-managing system in place, you can start to role out self-service IT systems for your users so they don't bother you for password resets. Some would say that you're putting yourself out of a job by doing this, but if you play your cards right and plan out the technical and the social aspects of the project, you will really be a hero and you'll probably be seen in a more respectable light.
visit http://www.microsoft.com/ebs