Kevin McDonalds Blog

• Microsoft Unified Communications – Proof Of Concept update

  ITS needed to develop a platform that brings communication convergence to the desktop to enhance/enable spontaneous communication and collaboration within and externally to Vanderbilt University. We now have forty-one users on the POC, all at varying levels of service. Sixteen of the users are full Unified Communications with their email living in Exchange 2007 and twenty-three have just instant messaging and presence.

  The team produced a small video displaying the agility and spontaneity that can be gained from the use of Unfired Communications. This four minute video has been showed to different groups to gauge the interest in such a project. There seems to be a large interest in this technology.

• Microsoft Unified Communications – Production Pilot

  The other initiative is to get the schema changes into the Production Active Directory. To accomplish this we deployed the schema changes into the MS-Test environment. We also deployed a working OCS Standard server into that environment, to help identify the attributes that will be needed for the development team to automate activations.

  After two weeks of life in the MS-test environment, we were able to make the schema changes into the Production Active Directory, there were some hurdles in this deployment, most of them have to do with the locked down security model of the root domain, and being able to add attributes into the child domain using the Enterprise Administration roles.

  We have also set up meeting with Microsoft and one of their Partners to help validate our Design, and to gain us entrance into the MS Lighthouse program.

• Adobe Flash Server upgrade

  Application Hosting System Administration Upgraded the adobe 'Flash' server to the latest revision. This update was performed by request in order to provide expanded capabilities to end users of the flash service.

• New Load Balancers for IdM on their way!

  The original network load balancers used to balance the IdM LDAP authentication service deployed in June did not meet expectations. Since then, Application Hosting staff have evaluated and purchased lab equipment from F5 called BigIP Local Traffic Managers. Thorough testing has resulted in the procurement of an entire infrastructure based on this technology that is intended to be deployed in three data-centers throughout campus. The equipment is expected to arrive in late September.

• ITS Owns the Change Management Application!

  This month, ITS staff migrated the Change Management application from the VUMC server named "trutto" to the VU server named change.its. The medical center retired its use of this application last year, and has donated the code to the University. ITS staff have already customized the application adding in rich features and more business aligned data fields.

• Extending the use of the VU Data Center

  This month, ITS NOC personnel, Application Hosting administrators, and several co-located departments throughout campus worked together to complete Phase I of the "Data Center Re-alignment" project, which is underway in order to more efficiently cool the thousands of computing devices housed in the data center.

• Lifecycle Replacement

  ITS System Administration replaced the three existing VUExchange Mail Front End servers this month with brand new equipment. These servers are used for web email capability, all smartphone Activesync connections, and mail routing for the exchange environment.

• Additional diskspace for research computing!

  This month, ITS Storage administration staff upgraded the BlueArc Network Attached Storage appliance adding 64 SAN ports and 45 Terabytes of space. The Bluearc is a storage array that supports the Research community here at Vanderbilt University.

• Operational:
  • 175 Magic Tickets were processed in Applications Hosting.

• 46 VUmail to VUExchange Mailbox Migrations