How to move 160 servers without moving 160 servers

What are some of the challenges faced by IT Services staff? Here is a guest contribution from “Bobby G” – one of our senior IT technical staff:

“It may not be the type of question we ask ourselves everyday but we have recently been in a position where we have been required to move 160 of the university’s key servers onto new computer hardware often in diverse locations, and we wondered how to carry this work out as quickly as possible and with as little impact to our customers as possible.

The servers are all real working servers providing many important roles for the University including Library, Teaching, Financial, Research, and Support services. The amount of data involved is also quite large with around 5TB of data being involved (For those of us familiar with 1.4MB Floppy Disks that’s around 3.5 Million Floppy disks worth of information).

There is a trick as I suppose there usually is with these types of questions, and the answer is to move most of the servers in a “virtual” manner. This still involves moving where the server really is in terms of all of its intelligence (CPU/Memory), but actually leaves the data with all of the information and disks exactly appearing to be where they always were. There are now a number of systems which allow us to carry out this type of work and the University has used a tool from VMware in this instance. This has allowed us to reduce the total number of real physical servers used by half from 20 to 10 servers while almost doubling the amount of computing power available.

This makes the system much greener as there are significant savings in electricity and room cooling costs, and makes it much easier to add additional servers at a very low cost.

With a little careful planning we were able to move all 160 servers in around 9 hours one weekend with most services being unaffected by the move and most of those that were affected only being shut down for around 10 minutes.

The new setup of the system has been automated in such a manner that as servers get busy or if a physical server fails the “virtual” server will now move around to find a comparatively quiet working server and no one will even know it has moved (unless they have access to the log files). So we currently know the room that your server runs in but not exactly where it is as it may have moved itself in the last 10 mins. One of the next challenges we are giving ourselves is to setup the system so that we don’t even know which room the server is running in to allow the systems to move between buildings for themselves when a service is busy or there is some form of problem (e.g. power outage) in a building.

So in answer to the question “how do you move 160 servers without moving 160 servers” – you only move the little bit of intelligence that runs the servers and leave the rest set up as it is. (i.e. move where the server thinks it is).”

Technology in Teaching Spaces in RGU Riverside East

RGU’s new Campus Masterplan Building – “Riverside East” – is due for handing over to the University in April, and the Library will be the first official occupants – moving in during May. After several years of planning, preparation, procurement and building – we’re almost there! You can get up to date information on preparation for the move by referring to our “Campus Moves” web page:

One aspect of the new building that has been continually in our minds has been how to fit out teaching spaces with new technology to support anticipated future approaches to teaching and learning.

Work to scope the design of the new facilities started back in 2009, with a working group that included representatives from all faculties. This group was provided with basic room layouts and asked to discuss key questions about the way in which staff would want to use the spaces.  These questions included: “What will staff want to be able to do?”  “What will they want their students to be able to do?” Outcomes from these discussions helped to feed in to the specification of the room designs in the new building.

IT Services, DELTA (The Department for the Enhancement of Learning, Teaching and Assessment) and Estates and continued to refine and develop the technical specification of learning spaces as the Masterplan project proceeded. We learned from developments in other Universities and activity in corporate environments – both in the UK and internationally. I wrote in a previous blog entry the key design principles that we wanted to see in the new building and since I wrote that blog the demonstration facility has been created in DELTA’s offices in St Andrew Street.

You can get a preview of all the features in an online video tour.  This includes links to specific video guides to each of the key features.  Staff at the University are also welcome to visit the demonstration area in DELTA’s offices and try it for themselves (contact Nicol Ferguson).

DELTA will  be coordinating a programme of staff development to help staff learn about the potential, and  encourage  best use of the features.  This will range from basic “how tos” of using specific pieces of kit, through to considering blended learning designs to make best use of the combination of the virtual learning environment and the new physical environments.