Server+ – 7/27/2009

Server upgrades was on the agenda for today, and we talked about several pertinant issues dealing with upgrading our servers.  For that discussion, we discussed the preparation for upgrades along with upgrading the various components inside the server.

Rarely will you just decide one day that — hey, this server seems slow, it’s time to upgrade it!  Instead, you’ll run into a couple of upgrading scenarios: a) your servers are on a 3 year (or 4 year or 5 year or whatever) refresh rate, meaning every 3 years the equipment is replaced, so that at any given time there is no equipment over 3 years old.  This is a good policy, and I’d recommend it where budgets allow — this ensures that you always have the latest technology and lessens (although certainly doesn’t entirely remove) the risk of having hardware go bad.  The other scenario (b) is that servers are allowed to work until they become too slow.  Unfortunately this oftentimes is decided by some bean-counters’ intuition, but hopefully you’ll be able to perform some actual benchmarking to prove this.  A good one to look at on the Windows Server systems is good old Performance Monitor.

As a reminder, your mid-term is next week, and it will be over the five chapters we’ve covered so far (there won’t be a quiz on Chapter 5, don’t you think a mid-term is bad enough?  Jeez.)

Homework:

• Chapter 5 Review Questions
• Study for your Midterm (Chapters 1 -5)

Preparation is one of this most important things you can do re: upgrades — nothing is more frustrating than having an entire server torn down only to find out that used non-returnable part you bought on ebay was the wrong part and you have to put the server back together, go hat in hand and explain your mistake and ask for more money.  Never fun.  Some things to watch out for: RAM type and speed, processor type and slot type requirement, expansion slots, software