Kevin McDonalds Blog

ITS Storage Administration has been evaluating numerous B2D "backup-to-disk" technologies for the past year. September was spent evaluating a virtual tape library from EMC called an Enterprise Disk Library (EDL.) The purpose of this evaluation is to mitigate numerous problems in a de-centralized enterprise sized backup environment by the induction of a speedy disk layer.

This particular evaluation is going pleasingly well. ITS storage administration is measuring very good performance (700 Mega Bytes / second) through the EDL.  This solution runs an active/active configuration and one engine will take over the other engine's work load in the event that one goes offline. 

ITS Virtualization and DOA support staff worked together this month to perform a "Physical-to-Virtual" migration of the DOS Support Web server. This places the server in a Highly Available and climate controlled environment using VMWare-HA and the ITS ESX cluster that operates inside the Hill center data center.

ITS System Administration is researching various VD technologies. They have successfully configured the VMWare VDI implementation to auto provision VM's so that administrators will not have to perform multiple manual tasks to entitle a new user for a Virtual Desktop. The process has been isolated down to adding users to a group in Active Directory. They have also successfully tested a "direct connect" configuration where clients use the Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to connect directly to the VM as opposed to using a SSL tunnel over HTTPS; however, SSL tunneling is a superior solution from a security and performance stand point.

In consultation with EMC, ITS Virtualization staff has learned that VMWare VDI can be deployed in a "one-to-many" which enabled the ability to serve hundreds of virtual desktops from a single golden image. This ability is desired to simplify management and reduce costs.

In August, ITS Virtualization Staff dealt with a fairly significant Virtual Environment outage that occurred during a power maintenance event in the Data Center. While searching for a root cause, the staff uncovered several mis-configurations in the environment. There was a concerted effort to fix these which has now been completed. This included an audit of the ESX power/network connections to verify redundant network switches were being used in ether-channel trunks, as well as verifying that all appropriate VLAN's were mapped to each ESX server. In addition, some enhancements were made such as distributing public keys to each ESX host and validation of the NTP configurations. 

The ITS Email Administration team worked with Microsoft Engineers and Voice partners this month in order to validate the initial design during an Architectural Design Session. They also met with the Unified Communications representative from Microsoft to apply for the Lighthouse program and reviewed the current infrastructure and identified that Vanderbilt is on track.

• 205 Magic Tickets were processed in Applications Hosting.
• 44 VUmail to VUExchange Mailbox Migrations
• 1 Staff attended EMC Clariion Host and Integration Management
• 6 Staff attended Microsoft Exchange 2007 installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting course.
• 1 Staff member attended the VMWare VMWorld 2008 conference
• 1 Staff attended the Microsoft Sharepoint Best Practices conference