Kevin McDonalds Blog

ITS Application Hosting is performing a pilot run of the Microsoft Exchange 2007 server environment. Getting email functional has been fairly simple, but integration with the Vanderbilt environment has been challenging.

In support of the Division of Student Life’s data mining needs, ITS System Administration staff implemented a SSIS package to run a TSQL query and export the results to an XML file.

The ITS System Administration staff has enabled Virtual Machine snapshots as a feature of the VM Hosting service. This allows virtual co-located customers to take “moment-in-time” snapshots of their running virtual machines. This can be useful when recovering from a failure such as a bad software install or a system administrative error.

The ITS System Administration staff has updated the security patches of the web infrastructure, allowing for a more secure web experience.

The ITS Storage Administration staff continued the evaluation of the NEC Hydrastor network de-duplication device in February.  This evaluation is needed to enhance the backup architecture.

Application Hosting worked with the ND&E Staff and has implemented http://speedtest.vanderbilt.edu/ which will test the upload and download connection speeds of a network client.

• 170 Magic Tickets were processed in Applications Hosting.
• 13 IMAP to Exchange Mailbox Migrations
• 2 Staff obtained the VMWare Certified Professional Certification
• 6 Staff attended “Implementing & maintaining SQL Server 2005 database” course
• 2 Staff attended the “Redhat System Monitoring and Performance Tuning” course
• 1 Staff attended the “Legato Networker” training