New client nightmare!

[krumpt]

So I have taken on a new client, 3 office doctors practice, and they are running in a mixed mode AD environment. They have 2 DC's and an exchange controller, all of which are running w/o any form of raid, on older home brew machines. This would be fine if they didn't contain critical information, such as medical records, and their email!! So I am now fraught with trying to put some redundancy into this accident waiting to happen, but I fear I may be over my head; It's been quite a while since I have done AD, I did get my MCSE years ago and never really used. So my thought is to get a very redundant machine and migrate these machines to VM's, any issues with Exchange and DC's on VM? Critical points here are redundancy and ease of backup / restore. Any thoughts?

Regards,

John

[decepticon_eazy_e]

So I have taken on a new client, 3 office doctors practice, and they are running in a mixed mode AD environment. They have 2 DC's and an exchange controller, all of which are running w/o any form of raid, on older home brew machines. This would be fine if they didn't contain critical information, such as medical records, and their email!! So I am now fraught with trying to put some redundancy into this accident waiting to happen, but I fear I may be over my head; It's been quite a while since I have done AD, I did get my MCSE years ago and never really used. So my thought is to get a very redundant machine and migrate these machines to VM's, any issues with Exchange and DC's on VM? Critical points here are redundancy and ease of backup / restore. Any thoughts?

Regards,

John

Build redundancy into the box and you should be fine. RAID, dual NICs, ECC ram, dual CPUs, etc. When you do a P2V on the others, you should have no problem, but the Exchange conversion will take forever unless you take it offline. You will have to make them live without email for a weekend to get this done right.

There are services out there that will catch or host your email until your server comes back online and then push it all down, this would also be a nice service to keep running in case of server failure.

[VaKo]

Build one VM box for exchange and a DC and another physical DC (a cheap poweredge low end, nothing special), that way you build a bit of redundancy into the system. If you have one box for everything, single point of failure. Also, don't do homebrew builds, go to dell and get a next day/4hr on site support contract for 3 years.

[CrystalMethod]

Build one VM box for exchange and a DC and another physical DC (a cheap poweredge low end, nothing special), that way you build a bit of redundancy into the system. If you have one box for everything, single point of failure. Also, don't do homebrew builds, go to dell and get a next day/4hr on site support contract for 3 years.

What's the actual lead time on the Dell's these days?

[Sparda]

As a quick fix to get redundancy in to the computers. You could get a RAID card, get two hard disks, configure them in RAID1, image the existing hard disk to the nice new RAID. I wouldn't bother with resizing the partition, that's just more bother than it's worth.

[VaKo]

What's the actual lead time on the Dell's these days?

Depends, Dell direct can be pretty slow but there are numerous middlemen firms that can fast track it for you. The kit is pretty good though, so a week or so wait time isn't a huge problem.

[MRGRIM]

Depends, Dell direct can be pretty slow but there are numerous middlemen firms that can fast track it for you. The kit is pretty good though, so a week or so wait time isn't a huge problem.

I'm a huge Dell fan, ALWAYS take the 3 year warranty. Any problem I’ve ever had has been resolved Next working business day. For minor items e.g. replacement disk drives in desktop’s or laptop’s they’ll normally just overnight the part to me.