Moving a Symantec BackupExec 12.5 installation to another server

As part of our server consolidation and virtualisation project, we had to move an existing Symantec BackupExec 12.5 installation to another server. Symantec's document ID 319367 gives a very detailed procedure for performing this migration which worked to a tee for us. Give yourself about two or three hours to run through the entire procedure.

Virtual servers and SANs

Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis

We're undergoing a major project to consolidate most of our server infrastructure as virtual machines under Windows 2008 Hyper-V. Suffice to say this is going to be a pretty intense 6 weeks, but at the same time it's a rare opportunity. We're also installing Active Directory (having previously been under NetWare's eDirectory, but never heavily used), so we also get to build a new domain from the ground up.

The primary motivator for this was that one of the core business applications here now requires an AD environment going forward. We then looked at how we could best take advantage of the new capabilities we'd have with AD, and that some of the hardware was past its life expectancy. Then we looked at other smaller projects planned for the ywar, and realised what infrastructure was needed for those. We had initially planned on a traditional server-based architecture for this refresh but suddenly realised that this was a prime candidate for virtualisation, and even more than that, it only made sense to do all this with a SAN. Once we got it all priced out and saw that for a relatively small increase in price we could make our environment extremely flexible in terms of service provisioning, well one thing led to another, and here we are.

There are a few challenges we have to deal with:

• Our current internal DNS server is BIND9 running under Ubuntu Linux, and for the sake of making sure that "weird stuff doesn't happen", this needs to be moved to Windows.
• We're moving from an externally hosted MDaemon mail server to an internally hosted Exchange server, so there is an obviously large transition there.
• All of the virtual machines are hosted in one physical server. Our disaster recovery plan calls for a second virtual host to be located offsite and be ready to take over primary operation within one business day should our entire head office go up in flames. Data replication is the tricky part here.

If we do everything right, our users won't notice much of a difference - certainly very few service interruptions - and they'll have a lot of new features at their disposal along with some performance improvements. Not to mention that we expect our power usage to be cut in half.

This will indeed be a tremendous learning experience.

Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade

Haven't posted in a while as I am living a real life.

For anyone keeping track, all of the ACPI problems I've talked about earlier went away with the upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 on my HP Mini. I get "dual" processors now so things run even more smoothly, and the very fast startup/shutdown/hibernate time is a real treat.