Schlagwort: Microsoft

Domain Controller Upgrade

We finally started upgrading the domain controllers (DCs) here at Translink, which are currently running Windows Server 2003, to Windows Server 2008 R2. Yay! As I told you in a previous post, this is necessary for the Exchange 2010 migration to start.

On Thursday after lunch Rory, a server technician working for Northgate, came to our office to support us with the migration.

First we set up a temporary (virtual) DC, moved the services and copied the FSMO roles to it.

Now we could start upgrading the DCs. As Windows Server 2008 R2 doesn’t allow an in-place upgrade from Windows Server 2003, we had to do a complete new installation. So we demoted the first DC to a normal member server and then removed it from the domain. Now we could install the new operating system, get a cup of tea, do some basic configurations, join the freshly installed server to the domain and run dcpromo to make it a DC again. Of course we repeated this procedure for all DCs, one at a time.

Finally we moved the FSMO roles back to the DCs they were initially running on, moved the services … and Bob’s your uncle! 😉

In the end we left the office at approximately 19:30.

Active Directory Upgrade

This week I was introduced to another project at Translink: Plans are to upgrade the Active Directory infrastructure from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2. The project is realized in cooperation with the IT service provider Northgate.

One principal reason for running this project is that another project depends on this Active Directory upgrade: the migration from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010.

A project assistant from Northgate came to the office to talk with my colleagues and me about the hardware (physical and virtual) and software requirements as well as the necessary network (re)structuring.

Getting Started with Microsoft Hyper-V

Translink is about to start a new virtualization project. They decided to use Microsoft Hyper-V as the hypervisor. The virtualization cluster, which is built on HP servers consists of 4 nodes which each have 2 6-core Intel Xeon processors and 96 GB of memory.

The first thing to do was to mount the servers in the rack which was done by my colleague John and me.

John cabling the power supply units

After approximately 90 minutes of work and 2 papercuts from the damn HP packaging (I have never got injuries from Dell packaging) the job was done:

the 4 virtualization nodes

A little project

During this week  I spend some time on configuring workstations for the NIPACS project, which was introduced in 2009. NIPACS means Northern Ireland Picture Archiving Communications System and enables hospitals to view digital medical patient data like MRTs on the computer and save it centrally in two data centers within Belfast. The advantage which comes with this technology is that medical patient data can be accessed by every hospital in Northern Ireland. The diagnostic workstations use very powerful hardware, meaning two Quad Core processors and 12 GB of RAM. Furthermore two high-definition displays of EIZO are used to view the medical pictures.

On Friday I got a little project. I have to set up a ESXi Hypervisor and configure a small Windows domain, including a Windows domain controller, a Microsoft SQL Server and some Windows Vista / Windows 7 clients. ESXi is already installed and the virtual machines have to be installed next week.