Bruce's Blog

Since coming back from Lotusphere, we have been making plans to upgrade our Domino environment from 7 to 8.  Originally we were thinking of buying a new server and putting up a new Domino 8 domain on Linux.  We were going to setup a new domain for 2 main reasons.  The first is because we have purchased some other companies and have multiple different email domains (the new companies in Exchange).  By putting up a new domain, we could make it more generic so we could make it more palatable to maybe move the back-end for the other companies off of Exchange and unto Domino.  The second reason was to make things all the new "version 8" way and not carry over so much legacy configuations (our current Domino domain started as either version 4.6 or 5.0 about 8 years ago, I forget which).

In the last few weeks, we've been making some other changes to our infrastructure (put in a new internet firewall, going to move things around in our computer room and add some new A/C units, etc).  Because of this, we need to get rid of an old rack that only has 2 active servers in it anymore.  One of them is our SameTime 6.5 server.  We could physically unmount the server from the rack and move it somewhere else, or install a new server with version 8 on Linux and get the web-conferencing piece working (which never did on the old box).  Also, we took advantage of a deal IBM was running and purchased 50 Quickr licenses.

To do these 3 things, we could buy 3 seperate servers, or we could buy 1 server with higher specs and finally (we have been looking at it for 3 years) move into the VMWare world.  We've had a SAN environment for over 2 years, but have never gotten to put in the "all encompassing" VMWare environment we've been looking at.  So, this would allow us to get into VMWare for a much smaller dollar figure.

Looks like VMWare is the direction we are going to go, YEAH!!!!!!

We are going to have 3 virtual servers - 2 are SUSE Linux for the Domino Mail Servers and the SameTime server, and 1 Windows 2003 server for Quickr.  All of them in a new Domino domain.

Let the fun began!