Backing up and Inventory….

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This morning I am backing up all of the machines on the network. Of course backing up is one of the most boring things there is (until something goes wrong!) so I am also inventorying my machines as well as the stash of hardware in my closet. All the while, the Media Center PC in my living room has been flattened (again!) and had some hardware swapped and is now getting the Windows 7 x64 Ultimate bits slapped down on it. I am guessing it will be at the “name your PC prompt well before I finish this post.

My goal for this whole project is to go from 4 machines running my network down to 3. Since I am going to virtualize most of everything I have decided to just build a brand new domain to replace the existing one. That way I don’t interrupt operations and I can take my time building things out. My current setup looks like this -

 

Humvee – this is my Hyper-V/SCVMM Server. It hosts two VM’s right now. This is a quad-core box with 8 gigs of RAM in it.

Crashnburn – this is my Exchange 2007 Edge server. It is one of the VM’s on Humvee.

Wallace – this is my web server and SQL server. It is the other VM hosted on Humvee.

Sleestak – a DC/Fileserver on physical hardware. this is a machine I want to virtiualize and eliminate the hardware for.

Bobobobobobobo – this is the “main” DC. I am going to leave this machine on physical hardware.

Wallofvoodoo – my ISA2006 Server. This will also remain on physical hardware though it will get wiped in the near future moved to new hardware and become a Forefront TMG machine.

 

The plan for today is to start building out a new DC for the domain and start setting up accounts. I am not going to migrate account information though because I want to organize my OU structure more logically that I had before and I just plain want a fresh start.

Ugh….. a few lines into this post, while backing up some data to a fileserver (I have two Buffalo Terastations that I store backups on), a drive died in one of the Terastations. Just so happens that is the server that I was backing up to. So now it is time to backup the backup! Fortunately I am RAID5 on that Terastation so data is intact. Normally I would rant and rave about it, but those two Terastations have been workhorses for me. I purchased them both at the same time and they have run nearly 24x7 for 7 years. It was time for a drive to fail.

Looks like it is going to be a busy day!

 

Cheers!