How I’ll Spend my summer vacation (or not) : Call for Advice –

[rmleonard]

This summer I get to COMPLETELY overhaul my serverspace (and re-do all clients too) ((about 800 clients and 7 Xserves)

I have one brand new xerve and a Promise Raid (half populated at 6 TerraBytes I think) that I can use to “seed” this beastie

I have 2 older Xraids (of varying size in the LUNs) and 7 older servers –
– 2 G4 xserves and 4 G5s and 1 Xeon

my goal (in my feverish drug induced haze) is to get Xsan on the G5s and Xeons
– Fiber channel it all together,
– use the G4s as “front ends” (possible round robins for AFP and Web)

now – how do i do this??

currently –
I have at least 2 OD masters in the old pool – I want to end up with 1 and a few replicas
web objects, web sites, mysql, lots of odd fileshares, mail and zimbra environs, wordpress and so on…

Main Questions to get me started –
Can I use the new dual CPU Xeon Xserve as the MDC _AND_ XSAN “root” environ (and all of the other services I can find) at least long enough to wipe and rebuild all of the other boxen
migrating the services off one by one until i get a more balanced “world”

(I know that “recommended” means at least 2 MDCs separate from the XSan “heads” but… to start with….. can it all live on one box?)

This way I could (in a sense) clone all of my services into “one place” then start shutting down old boxen – rebuild them and move things back over… once i get things stabilized go to the next boxen/service and so on….

I don’t believe that doing “upgrades” or “migrations in place” will work this time around as I need to move servers off of older VLANs into a new one and a few (the oldest G4 for instance) have been migrated up “too many times” – it is time to wipe and reload…

How would you all attack this kind of problem?

I’ll have limited junior staff support –
more percocet than you can shake a stick at and very limited personal mobility –
(I get a new C-Spine fusion right after WWDC – the warranty ran out on the last one – they have to re-do C6-C7 last year’s bone graft failed… )

Additionally – in this new world

I’d like to be able to put all of the “fixed” desktops about campus onto mobile accounts and use time machine (including labs)
I’d like the laptops to do portable homes (I should have in the neighborhood of 10 or so TB when all the LUNs are fired up)
and all that goodness
… we have Sassafras K2 and Deep Freeze to help with the labs
record augments to point student directories away from local boxen sounds real nice…….

Gotchas –

Our infrastructure is sadly capped at 100Mb/s not GigE
and I’ll have problems with the Cisco ACLs both internally and at the gateway
then there are firewall rules and then that pesky packet shaper may cause problems too….
but what the hey – I’ll have pain killers so it shouldn’t matter too much… maybe I can get some more fentanyl… hmm….

Ramblings aside – This is gonna be a heck of a project and it should be fun

Anyone want to help?
I have no money to offer, the Docs don’t like it if I share my meds..
the hours will be suckie as we are rebuilding a production environment…
and
it has to be complete before classes begin in September

And No, I don’t have a wheelbarrow or a Holocaust Cloak in my asset list
(but I do have OSX Server Software Select and Xsan Support if that helps)

Help?!?
Rich

[Author]

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