Monthly Activity report June 2007.
TechEd 2007 “Make your mark in IT”
This was probably the toughest week of the month. Too much food. Too many sodas, and way to much information! I can no longer use my excuse for not learning Linux, the excuse of not being able to type; Windows Powershell is being positioned as the administrative preference for Server 2008. Maybe this is the time to transition into a more administration type roll.
One of the main things that I took away from Teched, is that IT as a whole is changing, and changing quickly, this means that IT departments need to be more “fluid”, able to adapt dynamically. Even though this was one of the “buzzwords” there is a lot of truth in it. IT departments need to look at “Service organized Architecture”. If you’re not able to provide a service to your customer, quickly, efficiently and on time, you might find your department outsourced to someone who can. The keynote, repetitively hit on the subject of “fewer administrators, more uptime, and consistent services” all being driven by the architecture.
The other interesting thing I picked up, was that The university is facing the same obstacles as other Higher education institutions in the US. We are seeing a higher demand for infrastructure from our younger students, pushing our speed from conception to deployment a whole lot faster, the days of the university being 5-7 years behind Corporate America is rapidly coming to an end.
Service Center Operations Manager
I worked with Microsoft on issues with Systems staying in a not Monitored state. Even though we worked through many scenarios and configuration changes, it all came down to the machines DNS host name was still XXXXX.ds.vanderbilt.edu, and not XXXXX.its.vanderbilt.edu. This single issue has probably taken over 40 hours to research and fix. Once again advocating the use of DS.vanderbilt.edu as an actual ADDNS, this would have by-passed the need to manually edit the DNSHostname in Active directory. This current issue has been resolved.
I worked with Microsoft on the issue of Virtual resources not being monitored on Clustered servers. The issue is that the actual hardware and OS are being monitored, but the virtual resource or application is not. We turned on Kerberos logging, and have seen Kerberos errors in the Event logs. Current Status is MS has suggested we enable Kerberos Authentication in the Cluster Manager, to allow authenticated service to the Operations Manager server. Current testing plan is to turn it on, to see if it starts the monitoring on the Operations Manager server, then turn it back off.
Email oneness.
Have been working with Steve, and Scott Hogan, to document the service gap between the Medical center offering and the University offering. This gap, even though previously know, once documented looked more formable on paper. Bridging the gaps, in a near seamless fashion, could take 12-18 months. Once presented to the Core team, concerns of speed of transition, and cost, were realized as true valid concerns for the project. Moving from an analyze phase to a conceptual design Phase. We are now doing a conceptual design for a forklift type event.
Proofpoint Load balancing.
This project started to take form this month. We met, and have fleshed out the action items that are needed to produce a test environment of clustering the proofpoint behind the CSM modules. Even though this is a new project, the team is moving forward quickly, because this will help elevate the “max children errors” being seen on Mailgate02.
Thought: He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality, and will never, therefore, make any progress.” – Anwar sadat