MAR – Nov 2008
November 25th, 2008 by Daniel Raymer
1. DNS/DHCP
- The Diamond IP environment received an upgrade to 3.0.62 in a hope to solve some issues with zone publishing. While the software itself is stable, the problem was not solved. Oh well…
- The remaining 4 personnel in Application Hosting received their training on Self-Serve DNS/IPAM with the Diamond IP InControl software. I think everyone on both the AppHosting as well as the ND&E team can agree that this is a definite Win for both teams.
- RFC1918 subnets continue to be imported into the Diamond IP environment. Difficulties in DHCP failover w/ the supplied DHCP 3.0.6 version from BT INS keep us from really diving into migration of DHCP enabled subnets.
- I have exhausted my ideas on trying to get replicated DNS BIND Views implemented without using 72 hours of imports or significant name resolution service downtime. I escalated to BT INS but have yet to get an solid answer back from them.
- DNS survived the Great Power Outage of 08. Sure, service was degraded a bit with the Master down, but service never dropped completely off. YAY!
Next up… getting those Views implemented, NCS Self-Serve DNS Training, and Sapphire 3.0.72 upgrades.
2. The Virtual Environment
- Virtual Center upgraded to VC2.5-Update 3 – Kendra knocked it out of the park. Absolutely HAMMERED it. What an awesome job by her. I’m still wondering how some of the upgrade bugs escaped the VMware QA lab. We ran into the issue of vxpa corrupting on 3.0.2 hosts w/ VCMS 2.5u3. Took me a good portion of the night to figure out what was going on and how to fix it. While it took some time and effort, the capabilities now offerred with VC2.5u3 with ESX 3.5u3 have made our life soooo much better. And speaking of ESX 3.5u3….
- ESX Upgrades from 3.0.2 to 3.5 Update 3 – While it is not 100% complete (the prod AMD clusters remain to be upgraded), I am going to call this a WIN as over 1/2 of the total environment is upgraded and working extremely well. Storage VMotion has enabled us to FINALLY perform some much needed SAN consolidation. I also happen to love the new Health Condition report within the VI Client. I would love to say this upgrade was totally without downtime, but it was not meant to be so… of course, the downtime was pretty much our own fault. Putting servers on local storage, lack of VMware Tools, etc. Great job to Kendra and Scott E. for stepping up to help do the upgrades. BIG thanks!
- The Leviathan was pushed into production in a rushed manner to make up for the broken snapshots w/ the VCMS upgrade. Thanks to Kenon for the quick weekend work to get the storage presented and help get the service up and running. On a more positive note, it did push me rather forcefully into figuring out all the tricks with ESX 3.5u3 and well as getting the plugins working for VCMS. Nothing like a little pressure to make learning so much more satisfying.
3. RHN Upgrade
- RHN 5.1.1 has been pushed out the door and into production. 97 of the former ITS clients are re-registered and I hope to get the other departments to finally buy into what RHN Satellite can offer them in terms of ease of deployment via kickstarts, activation keys for RHEL5, easier/quicker patching, and a view into the health of their RHEL environments.
- RHN 5.2 was FINALLY released as well. It came a bit too soon to the 5.1.1 production date to put too much effort into it, but that is up on the slate soon. With Oracle 10g support (FINALLY), we can move this database to our existing, more robust clusters and gain some performance.
- The re-registration scripts worked for the most part and made it quite easy to register. Scripts are available for anyone in the Vanderbilt Community to take advantage of this service