Month: August 2013

I always forget the basics

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

I had a strange issue with one of my branch offices, where they would lose access to local resources and external Internet sites whenever our Site-to-Site VPN with the head office went down.

I spent around 3 hours troubleshooting this issue, desperately looking for a logical cause. It wasn’t until I paid closer attention to the DNS settings that were being received from the DHCP server did I notice that the primary DNS nameserver was a legacy domain controller within the branch office that no longer existed, and the secondary DNS was a domain controller in our head office, across the VPN.

When the VPN link went down, the clients had no resolvable DNS servers, and thus couldn’t access anything except by direct IP.

When I discovered this, it was a quick fix that brought services back online promptly.

Unfortunately it is all too often that I dive into a problem looking for a cause that is complex without seeing the simple issue right in front of me. I need to learn to be a little more methodical in my problem solving, and start with Layer 1 first.

Hyper-V 2012 R2

Jeff Miles 3 Comments

If the release date of Windows 8.1 is any indication, Server 2012 R2 is nearing RTM and I’m super excited, despite the fact that there are only one or two features that I’d likely be using.

Most of my interest comes from Hyper-V improvements, especially VHDX online expand. I’ve been slowly converting my VHD’s to VHDX during maintenance windows, and I’m sure glad I’ve been spending the time. Being able to expand the size of my VM disks without downtime is a huge benefit.

Unfortunately it looks like I’m going to have to rebuild my cluster again since you can’t have dissimilar host OS within a cluster. That really sucks, but I take solace in the fact that I can do an upgrade of Server 2012 rather than a complete bare-metal reinstall.

 

There’s still lots of improvements to be made in my Hyper-V environment, starting with backup and disaster recovery. My backup plan from 2012 never really got off the ground due to a variety of issues, but that is going to be picked back up right away. Now my preliminary thoughts (before spending time researching) is to get a second SC847 disk chassis, and set up one inside the LAN for backup using something like AppAssure, Veeam, Unitrends or Altaro. Then replicate that backup repository offsite to the second disk chassis over whatever link I have available. This way my primary backup is done over gigabit, and then the replication can take advantage of deduplication and other replication technologies. Then I’ll add Hyper-V replica to the mix for disaster recovery plans.

So far in my environment I haven’t had to scale up to a 3 node cluster, but I’m budgeting for it this coming fiscal year anyways because it’s going to happen, and I’m excited for that too. It will give me more RAM headroom per host when doing server maintenance, and offer improvements in performance for some of our heavier VMs.

Well that was unexpected

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I’Road_ThumbsUp_Successm working late tonight fixing some stuff with Sonicwall, and it worked on the first try! Now that my SSL-VPN is configured over port 443, hopefully it will pass through a client’s super restrictive firewall without issue and solve a long-standing issue for my user.

I’m calling it a night, ending on a high note.

IT Operations vs IT Projects

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

Does your IT department understand the different between IT Operations and IT Projects?

It has taken a while but I’m beginning to understand the necessity of separating those two concepts, with the goal of being able to excel at each.

 

The IT Department at my company has grown, and while statistically it has kept pace with the growth of the company, realistically when looking at staff utilization and slipping deadlines there is definitely room for improvement.

When I started in 2005, I was the second IT staff member. Between my co-worker and myself all IT responsibilities were handled; from user support up to infrastructure planning, purchasing and maintenance.

It wasn’t until January 2012 that we added and additional staff member to assist with IT Support; by this time the company was pushing 400 employees across 6 locations.

Due to the fact there were only 3 of us, there were still a large amount of shared responsibilities; despite looking after all of our infrastructure I never hesitated to assist with a minor excel problem. And for a company that only has 3 IT staff members and isn’t growing that may not be a problem.

However now in 2013 we’re at 5 people (two IT Support, one Jr System Admin and 2 System Admins) and are beginning to see the error of sharing responsibilities when it crosses the concepts of IT Operations and IT Projects.

Inevitably, IT Operations takes priority; if your revenue generating department demands an upgrade to the latest version of AutoCAD, and it’s approved (or already purchased), chances are effort is going to be made to complete that task. If the person responsible for that task is also trying to implement some new project (like FTP site replacement or Exchange upgrade or Hyper-V management, etc) it is highly likely the IT Project is going to be pushed back.

For IT Operations to be excellent, those staff need to focus on IT Operations. For IT Projects to be excellent (on-time and on-budget), those staff need to not be distracted by user support and install requests.

At the same time, I would say there still needs to be some overlap in one direction. Those working in IT Operations may benefit from inclusion in small IT Projects; to challenge their skills and allow for growth, learning and mentorship. It is motivating to be given some responsibility that is more than break-fix work.