The Grumpy IT Admin

Finally got around to upgrading VC to 4.1. all went very smoothly for a change. Just the one error on on ESX host about a log file that was full, cleared the log file and all was well again. Next up is to upgrade the hosts. this is something that requires a bit for juggling. Our Dev environment still contains 3 ESX hosts, this is while we sort out moving our SQL servers to our chunkier BL620 G7 blades, these currently have just a single server on to test them and were awaiting the 4-1 upgrade before we moved anything serious over. So the plan is to do the 3 BL620, then move some VMs over which would free up some room to upgrade the rest of production, freeing up a couple blades for dev so we can then shut down the ESX DL380 servers. Step one the BL620 upgrade. The first two blade went without a hitch, upgraded as expected through the upgrade manager. Hard core VM admins would probably use some command line tool but why make your life difficult? I have seen...

Those of us who have bought in to the Microsoft experience also buy in to the regular updating of our servers and the software that runs on them. Updating is a good thing and needs to be done regularly, but for many, myself included, it can be an incredibly stressful experience after so many failed updates and upgrades, roll back and long nights recovering from a bad patch or uppdate, not just to Microsoft products but also to others applications, drivers and in the case of EqualLogics firmware. One bad update can bring hours or days of fun. Down to the nitty, gritty of the problem. We have an Exchange 2010 system which has taken around 12 months to get to an almost usable state. The main problem has been the way our Domain is made and the requirement to set up a very resilient infrastructure spread across 4 sites in the UK. The root .com domain is in the US and there are 5 sub-domains for each country below that. Each country is fairly autonomous and t...