Video

Meanwhile, back at the old location

Robert Kloosterhuis — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:15:41 GMT

A tour of the current state of the office, and one of the server rooms, where most racks are now empty or near-empty.

An Epic moment. Gert-Jan uninstalls Citrix on the last 2 servers in the farm, effectively ending 6 years of the 2000-user, 60-server Metaframe XP Citrix farm that served our Netherlands users. I would have had Marcel do this, but he has gone on holiday.

Various IBM servers and almost all the blades lie ready to be moved to the new location. We don't have a use for any of these currently, so they will go into storage.

Remember when we where young and the world (servers) where new?

Both blade centers are going into storage, we have no use for them.

Blade Centers in they Hayday

The racks are becoming quite bare now.

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After:

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The pile for the garbage container crows and grows.

Marcel posing with all off the DL360 G3 severs (going into storage). he built the farm all those years ago, now he bears witness to its demise. Its a little sad for all of us that spent so years maintaining it all.

I managed to get my hands on one of my favorite servers, the IBM systemx 3650 with the 8 SAS disks in it. We reinstalled it as a new SQL2005 system, that will host, amungst other things, the HPSIM, IBM Director, Websense and Sharepoint databases. All for internal IT use.

Tags: server, servers, rack, racking, sysadmin, IBM, xseries, systemx, systemx+3650, bladecenter, blades, HS20

Datacenter Move post 4

Robert Kloosterhuis — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:28:30 GMT

Youtube videos are worth a thousands words, so I will let them do the talking.

Progress TCR Move May27 part 1 (the old location)

Progress TCR Move May27 part 2 (the new location)

What Mustafa thinks of IBM rackmount kits:

And some pics from the last 3 days:
(Click for larger versions)

IBM xseries 336, bout 3 years old now

ServeRAID 6M controller (in the PCI slot bay). Its IBM branded but its basically an Adaptec.
This comes out of one of the 2 xseries 336 servers that, together with the EXP400 shelf, served as a Windows 2003 cluster. The ServeRAID controllers are needed to provide failover control of the shared disk shelf.

Mainboard of an xseries 336, with the PCI card bay/thing removed. The blue bracket at the top is where usually an RSA-II management card would be sitting, but this one doesnt have one :(

ServeRAID 6M removed from PCI bay of the 336 server

The rack is slowly emptying. I remember when I was building it all up, 3 years ago! Check it out

Installing windows on an IBM xseries 336. Its been a while. I noticed the IBM Serveguide CD has a few more options now.

Picture I needed to have to illustrate where to connect everything.

Ready to move to new location

Not the most ideal way of moving servers, but its better than nothing. At least they are softer here than in the back of the car.

Richard, our project manager, trying to get more work in.

Temporary cabling ;)

Its slowly growing

They are not done with the rack interconnects, damnit. I cant finish my patching like this.

Our new firewall cluster

I love the blue glow of the console. Kinda wierd to have that out-of-place IBM in there, squashed between the HP.s. The cable rail for the server is different than HP aswell, so that will be fun to cable.

Moved some servers around, getting to our final config now.

WAN comms rack in the new location

LANcoms rack in the new location

Khalid on servicedesk duty

Gertjan is helping us decomission

Mustafa hard at work decomissioning servers

A lot of servers where decommissioned today, these are all basically being scrapped.

Videos of serverrooms and progress report

Robert Kloosterhuis — Fri, 23 May 2008 23:11:00 GMT

So I havent posted about our Datacenter move in a while.

Well we are starting to pick up the pace now, all the new servers at the new location have been set up, and various other teams are now installing their stuff on there.

We are now getting into decomissioning more and more servers from the old server rooms. Here are two videos of rooms as they were 2 weeks ago.

Old Datacenter 1 from Robert Kloosterhuis on Vimeo.
(I focus on one of the comm pc’s for a while, as the mouse was moving just a minute or so before I filmed this, someone was working on the box remotely, and I was hoping to capture it )

Old Datacenter 2 from Robert Kloosterhuis on Vimeo.

The pics below show some of the servers, or lack thereof (gaps), as we are starting to take the first ones out

Ready to be disposed of.

I had Mustafa looking at ways to make some ghost-based images of some of the servers, just in case something happened during the move. He has a version of Bart’s modular Boot disk running there, allowing very easy to configure dos-based network booting.

In clearing out the office, I also found some interesting items ;)

This nicely complements my collection ;)
All I miss now is the NT4 and 2008 resource kits!

Tags: datacenter, video, servers, racks, server, sysadmin