No blog posts for awhile because my day job has been all-encompassing as we planned a web server move from Boston to Utah. My company’s web service needed to be relocated which involves moving a farm of web, database, and miscellaneous utility servers. For those familiar with IT stuff, we are talking about two full cabinets of hardware.
So, was I driving a U-haul across country? No, of course not. Was I paying some consultants to drive a U-haul across country? We don’t have money for that! And if we did that, our site would have been down for days. We did the entire operation remotely and virtually.
First, the virtual part–we used software to create a virtual copy of the servers, then sent that file to a remote data center in Utah, where it was deployed as a virtual server. (Granted, I spent several weeks tweaking it to make it work!) But we avoided the nightmare of reinstalling everything from scratch–we just did a physical-to-virtual copy of each machine.
Second, the remote part. At 1:30am, our tech team logged on from locations in Boston and Utah (nobody was in the office at work; all of use were at home, using our home computers/high speed connections). We set up a telephone conference call and used Skype to instant message each other. I opened up multiple remote desktop connection windows that allowed me to access my desktop at work, all the servers in Boston, and all the servers in Utah. Then, I executed a series of steps to perform a final data synchronization, take the old servers out of service, put the new servers in service, etc.
At 6am, we text messaged our Product Manager to wake her up so she could log in and do some final testing. At 7am, we made everything live and immediately, our users started to sign on and use the service.
I categorized this post as “work/life balance” but I wouldn’t really call this a great example of that!