Blade Watch

Chris called me up on Christmas eve asking for help, one of their backup Citrix license servers had an issue, the conversation is below and as ever I have removed references to Chris and his company in order to allow him to remain below the radar in sunny Canary Wharf (East London).

“Hi, I have an emotional DL380 G3 which keeps failing the disks, which then rebuilds, it’s also rebooted a few times, any ideas? I did not want to mess with drivers and firmware on Christmas Eve.” asks Chris

“Yes your array controller appears to be getting ready for the holidays, log a call and get it swapped.

Check though, last time I had that the guy swapped both the array controller and the system board as he didn’t like the look of either.

Could you not virtualize it? What does it do?” I ask.

“Its the backup Citrix license server for one of our subsidiary groups, they don’t replace the hardware ever, I think we gave them one of our old DC’s just to get them of a Compaq 1850. I’ll have chat with them and see what they think, it might be easier besides I can get them off that old box.” he replies

Chris did indeed replace the broken DL380 G3 server with a virtual machine, (he told me a few hours later by text).

It is not that the server was beyond economic repair, or that it was out of support, it was deemed with his manager the quickest way forward, after a brief chat with the business owner for the server they were given a choice, wait up to four hours for parts, or two hours for a virtual machine. Virtualizing the broken DL380 G3 server enabled IT to return service, and recycle a server which IT had deemed out of economic support and a candidate for virtualization or decommission and recycling.

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