Lurker (2 points)
MATI provides telecommunication, IT, datacenter, and a multitude of other services for customers throughout the Mescalero Apache Tribe, New Mexico and customers across the US but until we recently implemented VMware ESX Server on a LeftHand Networks SANiQ/iSCSI SAN our services were limited to standard IT, telephone, etc.
One of our customers had an aging Windows 2003 SBS server with the system drive constantly running aground due to windows updates. They used database software that was continually affected by this as well as their Exchange/Outlook messaging, network printing, and of course numerous other "disk space" issues even though their data drive had plenty of room.
Their server came standard with only a 10 GB system (C:) drive but it was part of a raid configuration that spanned multiple drives so extending, partitioning etc. at the software level was virtually, (pardon the pun), impossible; I won't mention the manufacturer but I'm sure others have seen this configuration. We tried Partition Magic and others with no luck.
The customer is 13 miles from our CO/Datacenter so at first I didn't even consider virtualizing but after working together with some of the telephone guys we came up with a pretty wild solution.
Virtualizing their SBS server wasn't much of a problem and during the conversion I simply changed the drive size during the process and all went well.
The next problem was getting the users to connect to their work stations to their, once local, now virtualized file server.
We first tried their bridged DSL connection, our ISP service, that was in place for sometime providing Internet access but it only ran at 1.5MB/768K and just wouldn't cut it. Plus there were firewall/routing issues within the Windows network.
Our next step involved ADSL bonding but the speeds just weren't quite enough for LAN traffic so we knew we had to find another way.
MATI has fiber distributed throughout the tribe, some still "dark", but none that made it all the way to the customer.
"more on this tomorrow"