When I arrived in this job the half dozen servers were spread across four tables in a cramped room with a window air conditioning unit. The room was a tangle of wires; the UPS that was physically closest to a server was not necessarily the one it was plugged into. There were ethernet cables being strung in from other offices via the hung ceiling.
Doing something about the room was immediately put onto my list of big projects. While I am pretty sure every good admin dreams of nicely rackmounting everything, it can be an expensive route to take. With a good rack running $800 and rack mount equipment for servers costing $100-$200 per server, the costs add up quickly. The per server cost is reduced if the rack mounting hardware is purchased with the server. Racks are unfortunately not really an option for me however.
The initial cost (which I estimated at $2200) was only a small part of my decision to not rackmount everything. My biggest reasons for going with strong shelving instead of a rack was the need for flexibility and the lack of need for density. Racks make packing many servers into a very small space easy. I have plenty of space and no need for more than about 10 servers at any one time. Flexibility was really the deal breaker for me.
We had (and still have) a strange collection of servers and related hardware. With good shelves I don't need to worry about how or where I will store something when I consider a purchase.
It has taken a good deal of patience and nearly a year, but the room is
almost organized.
The
shelving is Metro Super
Erecta. It's 30 inches deep, 74 inches high, and 60 inches wide. In
theory each shelf can hold 600 pounds. That does actually hold pretty
true in the real world. The heaviest loads should be closest to the
poles to avoid sagging in the shelves. Also important to note, is that
this is the commercial version of the Metro shelving and not the consumer
stuff you may have seen at your local mega-homestore.
The back
of the eight port KVM with neatly tied down cables. Nearly every wire on
the shelf is tied down with cable ties (yellow ones seen in this picture)
and labeled at both ends (white tags visible in this picture). The
labels were made with a Brother Ptouch 2600.
There is an
admin console and a KVM switch to access all of the servers and computers
on the shelf. The KVM is an 8 port Belkin (nothing designed for
rack mounting should use a wall wart).
There are five
UPSes on the middle shelf, four 1500A APC
SmartUPS and one 750VA one. We only need two of the four
1500VA UPSes to run all of the servers off of batteries for around 30
minutes. Having four means we can run off of batteries longer and it
means that we can have up to two fail without loss of protection (this
does assume as in our case that all of your servers have dual power
supplies and they are plugged into different UPSes). The 750VA UPS is
used to power the console and the in-room ethernet switch.
There
are still some wires to tie up and neaten. That should be easy to fix,
as soon I find a source for various lengths of decent power cords. The
window air conditioner is another matter all together. That is a
subject that shall be saved for another time.
I have an Active Directory with about 900 users. The vast majority
(all but about 15) have a single mandatory roaming profile. Because of
some inconsistencies in the creation of user accounts over the years, how
the profile location is specified in an account varies. Some accounts
have "\\servername\profiles\normal\" some have
"%logonserver%\profiles\normal". I needed to standardize these to
"\\newservername\profiles\normal\".
The easy way would be with the graphical tools. Select multiple
users in Active Directory Users and Computers, right click, and select
Properties.
With this form it is relatively trivial to change a huge number of
accounts. While I changed nearly the profile path listing to
"\\newservername\profiles\normal\", I changed some (those accounts that
have their own profiles) to "\\newservername\profiles\%username%". There
are a variety of other environment variables available.
The hard way would use the
Directory Service command-line tools from Microsoft that were included
with Windows 2003 Server. They are quite powerful tools that allow you to
query, modify, add, or whatnot.
The command I ended up with, after a great deal of experimentation
(most of it was simply getting comfortable with the tools and toying
with examples provided in Microsoft's documentation), was
dsget group "CN=groupname,DC=ads,DC=example,DC=com"
-members -expand
| dsmod user -profile "\\servername\profiles\normal"
the dsget command returns one per line a list of users that belong to
the group "groupname". dsmod takes that output and changes the profile
setting.
Other interesting examples of the DS tools.
This will get you a list of all members (recursively expanded if you
have nested groups) of group groupname.
dsget group "CN=groupname,DC=ads,DC=example,DC=com" -members -expand
To create a new user
dsadd user "cn=username,DC=ads,DC=example,DC=com"
Much of my experimentation with the DS tools was done with thoughts of
finally scripting account creation floating through my head. Let me just
slide this into a slot near the top of to do list.
I just bought a Dell Server. I have had my eyes on a server for over six months now. It is going to be the other half of a pair of VMWare GSX Server hosts. It will provide a means for reasonable disaster recovery, a good deal of room for expansion, and the means with which to eliminate at least one physical server.
I originally spec'd the machine with dual 3.6Ghz Xeon's, 6gb of ram, four 146gb 15k drives, two 73gb 15k drives, and 3 years of gold service. The Dell website told me it would cost $11,000. That price was reached through the Wisconsin State Dell Store. The same machine configured through the Small Business store put the price at $12,500. The Medium and Large Business store didn't give me the options to configure a machine with the same specs. We ended up paying less then $8,000 after speaking with the Wisconsin Dell representative.
In a way, I like buying from Dell. It's always a pleasant surprise to spec a machine at the price I want to buy it at and have it cost much less. But it is also an exercise in abusive selling tactics. I really dislike it when companies screw with their customers.
I would love to be rebellious and say that I have no intention of purchasing from Dell again (this time I had no choice as I had to have a server that matched certain specs of my other VMWare Server host), but it is not quite that simple when purchasing for a university. There is political pressure to purchase from University approved sources. There is an economic advantage (Dell provides us excellent rates) of purchasing from the State's primary computer supplier. And finally, the State contract provides warranty and service from Dell that simply can not be had for a similar price.
One day when I actually put out most of the fires that are raging, I will have the time to persue purchasing from other vendors, perhaps whitebox ones where I get to choose the specific components.
