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...

Everyone hates it but it is a necessary evil that we have to go through at least once a year, some twice others, god help their minds, several times. In previous years we have had a truck turn up with a roof that went up to create a two story office, a bit like a low rent Formala 1 paddock truck with a bad paint job. You had the office upstairs and a bunch of racks with a HP EVA SAN and a shed load of servers of your choice and some tape libraries. We would get our backup tapes and recover as many systems as possible pretending we were doing a good job and if it came to it we could recover all our systems within a week, whilst knowing full well we wouldn't have a hope in hell. Now my life is made a lot simpler. We have visualized as many of our systems as possible, these are all stored on some cheap EqualLogics (compared to EVA and all the licenses) and replicated to a remote site. I now sit at my desk and bring online replicated copies of our VMFS partitions, present to our ho...