In between keeping all things computing running at Thayer, we always have several projects in the works. Here’s a quick overview of projects we’re currently working on or planning. In no particular order…
Email and collaboration tools
Dartmouth’s Council on Computing has constituted a task force to determine Dartmouth’s requirements for future email and collaboration tools. Thayer School’s Director of Computing Services is on the task force and seeks your thoughts on the subject.
Hard drive based back up server
We are a “belt and suspenders” computing staff. To [snip...]
Systems Administrators tend to worry a lot. Computers break all the time, and we try to have a plan for when the inevitable occurs.
On Friday the 8th, a hard drive failed on one of our physical servers. The server had four production virtual servers on it. Supposedly, the hard drives we use in our servers are less likely to fail. They come with 5 year warranties, and graduated at the top of their class. [snip...]
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Posted 20 February 2008
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In the past few months a huge change has occurred with Thayer School servers… now, most of them are virtual. Poof!
While the change isn’t very visible to the community, for us Systems Administrators (Jared, Jordan, and Matt Dailey), the change is significant.
Virtualization allows us to run multiple “computers” on one physical computer. So we can easily run independent servers for web site, email, databases all on one real server.
The short story is that we now have over a dozen virtual servers in production which has allowed us to save space, lower our hardware expenses, reduce electrical and cooling usage, ease backup, and improve reliability.
Read on for more details of our move to virtualized servers.
