We have a number of Windows Server 2003 machines that were installed by an IBM partner back before I joined the company.\u00a0 This company is marketed as \u201cexperts\u201d in servers, storage and virtualisation in Ireland.\u00a0 The first thing I did when I joined was audit the systems to see what I needed to do to make them fit for management \u2026 and then ft for purpose.\u00a0 Unsurprisingly, I found the C: drives were too small at 10GB.\u00a0 Once you do things like add in service packs, security updates, etc, that just won\u2019t do.\u00a0 That was one of around a dozen major faults I found with that company\u2019s work, most of which I spent some time sorting out last year.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been slowly working through the disk sizing issue.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been quick to \u201cun-recommend\u201d this IBM partner to people when talking to them in person.\u00a0 Strangely, IBM Ireland is very quick to recommend them for major infrastructure projects.\u00a0 I found them to be amateurs, e.g. the TCP DNS settings on domain controllers pointing to IOL\u2019s public DNS! <\/p>\n
By the way, I make C: to be a minimum of 40GB now on all servers.\u00a0 I used to go for 30GB but W2008 requires a 40Gb partition.\u00a0 W2008 only takes somewhere around 10GB but I think MS are leaving plenty of space for service packs and security updates; a wise move I believe. <\/p>\n
We purchased Acronis Disk Director Server to resize the C: partitions on this small set of servers.\u00a0 I\u2019d used it years before and it worked a treat.\u00a0 I installed it a while back on the first of the servers.\u00a0 Yesterday I ran a job to expand the C: volume.\u00a0 SQL 2005 was installed on the next volume, G:.\u00a0 I shrunk G: (it\u2019s a tiny database) and expanded C:.\u00a0 I committed the operation and rebooted.\u00a0 I was remotely located (but a short spin in the car from the servers). <\/p>\n
The servers rebooted twice and were back online.\u00a0 Voila!\u00a0 The C: drive was now 40GB.\u00a0 The OpsMgr agent came out of maintenance mode and then a series of alerts came in.\u00a0 Oops!\u00a0 Acronis has renamed the G: volume to D:.\u00a0 SQL had failed to start and a series of application services followed suit.\u00a0 I renamed the volume back to G: and things were OK.\u00a0 OpsMgr didn\u2019t alert anything after that and an inspection by the application\u2019s manager showed everything was working OK. <\/p>\n
That was the backup drive in the application \u201ccluster\u201d (not a Windows cluster but an application cluster).\u00a0 I\u2019ll be hitting the primary machine in a couple of weeks once I\u2019m sure the dust has settled OK. <\/p>\n
Acronis seems to be one of those companies that you think should have a bigger name.\u00a0 I like their disk management stuff.\u00a0 I know their cloning solution is loved by people who use it, e.g. I\u2019m told it\u2019s proven to be a fine P2V and V2P solution when native VMware or MS products can\u2019t do the job.\u00a0 Their products are pretty economic when you consider the time for engineering alternative solutions so give them a look to see what they can do for you. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We have a number of Windows Server 2003 machines that were installed by an IBM partner back before I joined the company.\u00a0 This company is marketed as \u201cexperts\u201d in servers, storage and virtualisation in Ireland.\u00a0 The first thing I did when I joined was audit the systems to see what I needed to do to … Continue reading “Acronis Disk Director Server”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-windows-server"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}