Project Log: - Office Move with Pics

[Wayshot]

Just to clarify, the old patch cables weren't reused, at least not for servers. New cables were used for the new server room.
We just sorted all the cables at the old server room into cardboard boxes - one for power cables, one for 1,5m network cables, one for 3m, one for 5m etc. It's almost three years since my internship ended, but I guess the cables still lay around somewhere in the cardboard boxes

 

[agrikk]

So I've finally organized the move-in pics of us going into the colo. This was the brunt of the work, but after Silverback left, I got so sit down and re-IP every single device, configure remote management and get everything playing nicely together. That took until late Sunday and then I turned it all over to the developers for reconfiguration of their various sandboxes and development environments. That turned out to be a cast-iron bitch because they'd hard-coded server IP addresses into various config files, databases, and code snippets that needed to be changed and recompiled.

Really? Pssst. Hey Developers: DNS works. Use host names for the love of god.



Anyways, on to pics:


gear

another shot of some gear

blocking the aisles

cables!

cables!

start of the work day

servers going in

still racking servers

proper documentation is key

VMWare stack

corporate server stack

database and storage stack

servers racked and ready to be cabled

top down shot of network stack

cabling kvm

network coming together

more cabling

jebuss, still more cabling

powering on gear

back of network stack

cable management. grey for remote management, blue for network

load balancer configured. green = good

backs of servers

backs of servers and iSCSI switches

backs of servers

stupid sagging Dell cable management arms

VCB server, three ESX hosts, NetApp iSCSI SAN

two domain controllers, Exchange server, file server and external DAS

 

[agrikk]

That said, I'm not saying Shoretel is bad... It's just more of a Honda Civic whereas the Cisco would be a Lamborghini Murcielago. Plenty reliable, just no class.

Hah hah. Except I'd never use a Lamborghini as my daily driver, either.

 

[jeffmoss26]

Looks nice. I take it the ShoreTel is at the new office?
I've never worked on one but have done some work with Inter-Tel/Mitel.

 

[agrikk]

Thanks and yeah. The ShoreGear will go straight to the new office.

 

[RiDDLeRThC]

Seems like a lot of wasted space in the racks. more to come? I'm a fan of fitting as much as I can into the rack before moving to another one but the company I work for is very cheap. he gave me shit when I asked for a tape dispenser. no joke

 

[agrikk]

The colo I'm in is more power bound than space bound. When I told them I needed 4 20 amp circuits they said I could have five (since they bill by usage) and the cages came with it with a nominal NRC. The fifth cage is going to be a lab and a sandox, but that gear won't come in until way later.

I hear what you mean about working for cheap companies. In this case cheap also meant plenty of room, so its a win-win. Goddamn I can't believe how nice it is to have all this space to move around in. Now the singe telco rack in our new office? Maxed out. Floor to ceiling.

 

[RiDDLeRThC]

ahh yeah forgot its all about power and not really rack space per say.

hell @ my company I'm surprised I was able to pull off getting a server room in the space. I can only fit about one full-size rack inside, two if I pushed it really tight.

Right now all I have is a 24u rack because that's all I was allowed to buy. its fulled with about 1u free. but on the other hand we won't be growing beyond it anytime soon so its all good.

 

[agrikk]

(^^ per se)




We are moving the office this weekend, wrapping up a process that's taken two months to implement and months longer to plan. Frankly, I cannot wait for this crap to be done so I can get my weeeknds and evenings back.

The office we are moving into in downtown San Francisco was a wing of a larger office run by our accounting firm. They moved a bunch of employees to the east coast and are now subletting the space to us. The upshot is since it was a wing, it had a simple wiring closet with a fiber run back to their server room on the other side of the building. They pulled out the fiber and their gear, but left the telco rack and cable management as-is for us to use.

Since it was a simple wiring closet, there's not much room for anything (hence our decision to move into a colo for our gear) and I was hard pressed getting the stuff in.

Here's how they left it for us:

Here's shots from today, including alarm stuff, door badge stuff, Cisco Aeronet 1100 WAP, ATT DSL router, and bundles of badly loomed cable that the contractors left for me to try to tame when they added 70+ runs to the floor. Assholes.


The botom of the rack contains gear that I've been able to move out of our existing office to set up this office.

Patch panels and Panduit cable management, courtesy of our landlords.

The bottom of the rack. The gaps will be completely filled this weekend. 45 U maxed out.

Top to bottom:
Dell PowerConnect 6248P switch
Dell PoE module
AT&T 3G MicroCell - what a piece of crap
Cisco 1941 Router
Cisco 1841 Router
Shoregear-T1 (with IP on post-it :eyeroll: just noticed it)
Shoregear-60/12
Dell PowerEdge R200 - Backup DC & Print Server
Dell PowerEdge R200 - DC
APC Smart-UPS 1500
APC Smart-UPS 2200XL


Another badly stitched shot of the cabinet showing more of the cable management up top.

This weekend we are shutting down the old office and moving everything out. I'll be spending saturday adding switches to the stack and reconfiguring them, bringing over the voicemail server and patching the switch to the floor.

Monday night I'm drinking. Heavily. Anyone want to join me?

 

[calvinj]

Monday night I'm drinking. Heavily. Anyone want to join me?

I'm In....

 

[jeffmoss26]

How many network drops do you have?

 

[Adam]

Here's how they left it for us:

Unacceptable, how dare they leave you that mess (grin)... thats not too bad..

 

[NTAuthourity]

I would hope that you arent the only one doing this agrikk if so then you do deserve a drink lol.

I'm guessing the 2 Shoretels which are missing are still in the old office?

 

[agrikk]

Unacceptable, how dare they leave you that mess (grin)... thats not too bad..

Right? They could have left wires all over the floor and a crappy looking rack, but it's actually in pretty good condition.

I would hope that you arent the only one doing this agrikk if so then you do deserve a drink lol.

I'm guessing the 2 Shoretels which are missing are still in the old office?

I have an intern who has been helping my move things and a boss who I've been keeping out of the way so yeah, you could say I've been doing this solo.



This weekend said intern and said boss and I are moving the furniture and whatnot from the old office. I'm shutting down and stripping the server room of anything not nailed down and I'll be racking two Shoretel components and two more Dell PoE switches in the new wiring closet.

There's going to be extra gear, so I'll be building myself a lab in the coming weeks. I am so ready to be done with this project. It's been satisfying but really, really drawn out and I'm ready to move on to other things (Data Warehouse, anyone?)

 

[jeffmoss26]

I'd rather be moving servers at my internship instead of sitting at a desk! LOL

 

[agrikk]

^^^ Always.


Well, today is the first day in our new office. The move went well for the most part, with only a few PCs not coming up after the move. Probably something jiggled loose during shipping.

I have pics to post, but I'm still putting schtuff away and my office currently looks like a Sanford and Son junk pile.

 

[agrikk]

Moving out day.

It's been a month and things have finally settled down. We had horrible network perormance that ended up beig due to bad intra-switch cables. Against my better judgement, I decided to re-use our existing cables in the new office to save a couple of grand. But I paid. Oh how I paid. Throughput on gigE switches was down to 100k for some users and internet access from the office (hopping across multiple bad cables) was down to 4kbps. Four Kay.

Let this be a lesson to you out there: When moving offices, throw out your old cables and replace everything. Spare yourself the hassle and angry users of troubleshooting bad cables.

At any rate, on to new pics!

When I last did the update, we were moving into the new office. So this next set is about that:



Servers, routers and ShoreTel gear going in

Beginning the patch down process

Side view of the telco rack

All the hardware in place

In the middle of the patch-down process

Patching complete

Patches to switches complete

Routers, redundant ShoreTel gear, servers( DC, print server and voice mail server) and twin UPSes in place

Back wall gear (Cogent fiber link, ATT DSL backup gear, alarm gear, Office WAPs, cable punch downs)

 

[calvinj]

As always very nice work. I really like the patches and that stuff.

Little off topic, but when the dust settles I sent you a PM

 

[agrikk]

...And because pictures are fun, a recap of the old office infrastructure:


This is what I inherited when I came on board over two years ago:

I turned it into this:

And then we moved out so I left this:

Since I came on board and reorganized and rebuilt the server room, We had no major outages, hardware failures or catastrophes of any kind. Farewell trusty server room. You served us well!

 

[dashpuppy]

VERY NICE WORK! Good job, good work always pays off

 

[MrGuvernment]

Really? Pssst. Hey Developers: DNS works. Use host names for the love of god

our coders always did this then would get mad if an IP changed cause i would replace a network card, told em as you did, DNS works, use hostnames