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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!"

3 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cloud Computing(TM) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    GNAA REBORN UNDER NEW LEADERSHIP

    DiKKy Heartiez - Berlin, Norway

    President timecop of the GNAA has died today. He died at the age of 55 from excessive lulz in his apartment in Tokyo, Japan while watching faggot cartoons of preteen girls beeing raped by giant testicles. The world will remember him as a total faggot douchebag who had the opportunity to unite the best trolls seen upon the face of the internet into one special hardcore machine of destruction, unfortunately he failed, instead devoting his internet carreer to animu. Although he died like a true hero he will be forever remembered as a total failure.

    In the wake of his death the GNAA is thought to perish like all the other so called trolling organizations. The writing is on the wall, they say. The GNAA smells worse than BSD, they say.They have said this for a long time. The GNAA has lived, with a very faint pulse, for years.

    DIKKY HEARTIEZ CLAIMS THE PRESIDENCY OF THE GNAA!!!!!!!

    With the death of timecop still shocking our chats, not many are able to see ahead. But there is one visionary Nord who has great plans for the new GNAA.
    "Under my leadership the GNAA will become the new home of all trolls on the internet. The GNAA will regain its old strength and will be feared by bloggers and jews alike. The time for CHANGE is now." DiKky HearTiez told a shocked audience outside the Gary Niger Memorial Plaza, Nigeria, earlier today. The GNAA will move its Internet Relayed Communications to a new location, following reports of a massive "Distributed Denial Of Service" attack on its previous location, making it unreliable.
    "Our operatives are in need of a robust and safe communications service with can_flood for everyone." An anonymous source at the GNAA Black Ops department told reporters at the same conference.

    KLULZ supports DiKKy Heartiez presidency!

    The infamous KLULZ internet radio station supports DiKKy Heartiez for the new GNAA president.
    "KLULZ is behind him 100% and will be broadcasting his speeches and support him in every way possible, we wish him the best of luck and an outstanding presidency. May many blogs burn under DiKky Hearties." This was stated by KLULZ Operations Manager and Gay Nigger g0sp when asked to comment on KLULZ involvement.

    About President timecop

    DEAD.

    About DiKKy HearTiez

    The world famous internet nord from Norway LOL HY living in a fjord LOL HY. Currently the new President of the new GNAA. He is also a radiodj on KLULZ and active in many irc chats. Known for several epic trolls in his time. Led the GNAA operation Intel Crapflood 21, who succesfully made GNAA owners of the biggest thread on Slashdot until fixed by admins. Also deeply involved in the war on blogs, and is the one who provided JesuitX with the real screenshots of Faggintosh Leopard. His leadership abilities, high iq and instoppable urge to troll, coupled with his fat Norwegian welfare check will enable him to become the best President the GNAA ever had.

    About KLULZ

    KLULZ is the internets radio station, bringing you news about the GNAA, hosting shows by prominent djs such as DiKKy, l0de, g0sp, jenk and many others. KLULZ supports DiKKy Heartiez. With mature content this channel is not suitable for children or people under the age of 18. Klulz radio can be heard at http://klulz.com/listen.pls

    About GNAA:

    GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first
    organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one
    common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

    Are you GAY ?

    Are you a NIGGER ?

    Are you a GAY NIGGER ?

    If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER
    ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA
    ) might be exactly what you've been loo

  2. Microsoft Essential Business Server by VTBlue · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    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

  3. Re:Most of the poster don't 'get it' by VTBlue · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    mod up.