I wanted to write a bit about some of the cool new projects i am working on at my new job. I am not going to go into great detail but it is something.
One of the biggest things i am doing is working on a plan to move an existing self hosted data center to a Co-Location facility. We just need more space. Thankfully instead of physically moving all of our gear we are looking at getting an all new setup built out and retire most of the old gear. The timing works out perfectly for us so we are giving it a try. We will be moving some stuff, but not a whole lot. Another thing we are trying to do is make this data center site the model (for us at least) for Virtualization. We are going to build out as much if not everything with the exception of SQL server as Virtual Machines running on VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure 3. If all goes according to plan it will be really cool setup. The TCO will also be allot less than doing it physically, it will be quicker to build out and deploy, and it will consume allot less power! The way i think about it is if we get a request for new servers to be build we just see how much Virtual capacity we have and just provision a new machine. If we don’t have extra space, we just purchase an additional node and more SAN storage and add to our VI3 cluster. The goal is to stay far enough ahead in available capacity (minus the N+1 for redundancy) that we always can accommodate even the largest provisioning requests. I can’t wait to see how this turns out! It will be interesting.
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