Hiya!
Well, it seems i have happened to neglect my blog yet again! Shame on me. Well I have my reasons, over the last few months, I have become Manager of IT at my company. I have been hard at work, tracking down issues from previous management. This company has went through about 8 managers in 5 years, so you can imagine how mis-matched the network is. Every IT person has his/her preference, on how the network should be setup. And with this network you can tell it’s nothing but patchwork after patchwork.
For instance, seems that no one realized that recipients policies were not running. Further more the reason they were not running was because of every server was trying to look for a domain controller that has not been apart of this network for 2 years according to the only other person here that remembers that server…. We even have servers running that he doesn’t know the purpose of!
So I have decided to rip the whole network apart and do a complete overhaul to Server 2008 across the board, and get our exchange environment up to exchange 2010. This is going to be a 60 server consolidation and upgrade, and I figure rough estimate of about 6 months to get it done. When I first started here in the IT department, a little over a year ago, I already have put the resources in place for such an upgrade. I got a VMWare ESX cluster up and running, and have decommission about 20 physical box’s. I have switched all generic web servers over to Linux. But the biggest challenge is yet to come.
To help with migrating our 600GB combined Exchange 2003 Environment, i took the liberty of acquiring a Barracuda Networks Message Archiver, and will be enforcing quota’s as of next week. The Archiver has been hard at work the last month and a half, pulling in all old email from the stores, along with PST’s we have lying around on the IT storage server. It just recently got done, this will allow me to start enforcing 2GB email quotes on users, and 4GB on Managers and Executives. Which will drop the exchange database to about 250GB’s. Much better for a move between environments, not to mention exmerge’s pesky 2GB limit… I do know that you can ‘migrate’ directly to exchange 2010, but I fear that during the previous managers reign, that the exchange stores still have a corruption in them from a dirty shutdown with circular logging on them.
Thats all for now folks, I need to get back to work!