Recently, i purchased a new hyper-V cheapy “server” – core i7 930, 24gb ram and 2 x sata 3 600gb raptors…. (which im running off the sata 2 controllers because of how shitty the mavell controller on the mb is… as per my previous post). Anyhoo, with this new hardware, i now have far more capacity… and have been able to move our infrastrcuture a bit closer to where it should be…
1) I implemented a Exchange 2010, 2 node DAG, with a 2 node NLB CAS/HT… which was so quick and easy to implement it was kinda scary. The only issue i ran into was… when moving a hyper-V server from one box to another, the guest’s NIC is re-created a new NIC and must be re-iped etc…. however – when moving an Exchange 2010 (any role) server between hyper-V hosts, when starting it up on the new host – the nic will not be re-detected. I pulled my hair out about this for about 30 minutes the first time it happened – then came back to the box and it had detected the NIC and all was fine. The next box i moved, i just left it, and sure enough, after 20 mins (or so) – the NIC would be detected, the driver installed, and away the server would go….. An odd issue that i didnt find a solution for, but maybe if someone else is doing the same, this post may let them know just to wait and not get stressed like i did!
2) Implemented DPM 2010, including SQL, Exchange , file and hyper-V backups. In addition i implemented a second replica server to replicate the backup sets of the first. This is the first time i’d used DPM 2010… and while there were a few minor things that could have been done better… i was fairly impressed. (but for gods sake MS, when installing the agent, just make the local backup components parts of the install)
3) The thecus N7700 NAS i got a few weeks back and also posted some initial thoughts on…. since then, ive pretty much decided the thing is a piece of junk. It becomes in-accessible daily, the web interface, while pretty, doesnt actually seem to set settings properly – and just doesnt work often. But the big issue is lack of support. The box itself has SFA logging (that i can find at least) – so finding the cause of a problem is just not possible. Next is Thecus support… who just seem to ignore support emails…. so… yes… moral of this part of the story – dont buy a thecus product…. just dodgey.