Know who you need to call, in case things (storage, servers, apps, whatever) don’t come back up. You don’t want to be trying to find phone numbers when everything’s going to the dogs.
Cheers Ken From: Richard Stovall [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, 2 March 2013 5:24 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Semi-OT: Vsphere shutdown Thanks, Steven. We're a small shop and the team is one other person and me. We had our meeting to go through everything yesterday. I've already created the plan of attack and written out configs for devices to my PC and a USB stick. The SQL DBA says his db backups are OK and he's ready. The only parts I'm deeply worried about are our HP blade chassis and EVA SAN. There shouldn't be any issues, but they were installed during a period when I did not work at the company and I have never gone through the shutdown procedure for them. The procedure itself seems straightforward enough, but those spindles have been going for about 4.5 years and it could mean a lot of restore time if more than two in any disk group decide that they don't want to spin up again. Cheers, Richard On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 12:57 PM, Stringham, Steven <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Get your order dependence list down. Make a list of all the services/servers and decide what order they should be shut down in and what order they can come back up. I did this recently (moved my datacenter to another location) and it made all the difference to have hashed that out and have a full list to check box as things went down and came back up. Provide this list to your team, and walk through the list multiple times with them as you go. Don't forget to add switches/routers/fibrechannel switches/firewalls/SANs/NASs/managed power strips/etc. to the list. Everything matters. Get a config backup of these on a external device (thumbdrive/laptop) and do a write mem on them before powering them down. Make a note of where the SQL servers are in that list - as well as the vcenter server. Is it hosting it's own database is or is it elsewhere. Also, make a note of which physical host that the vcenter server was on so you can connect to it directly to bring it back up. Make sure you have whatever config cables available to connect directly to the switches/routers etc. in case of trouble on powering back up. Good luck. Steven Stringham -----Original Message----- From: Kurt Buff [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] Sent: Friday, March 01, 2013 10:25 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Semi-OT: Vsphere shutdown On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 8:52 AM, Richard Stovall <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > In a few days time I will have to completely shutdown my datacenter > for some electrical maintenance. (Yes, I'm nervous. It's been online > non-stop for > 6.5 years.) > > I have 3 Vsphere ESX 4.1 hosts that I need to shutdown along with > everything else. My vcenter server is virtualized. Two questions: > > 1) Do I need to put the hosts into maintenance mode before powering > them off? All of the VMs will already be powered off. > > 1) I can poweroff two of the hosts using the vcenter client, but after > I shutdown the vcenter VM how should I poweroff the final host? Just > connect the client directly to the host and shut it down that way? I > can't think why this wouldn't work. > > Thanks in advance, > RS One more thing... If you have a multi-site environment, and your connectivity to the other sites will be affected, then when bringing things back up, make sure you have connectivity to the other sites before bringing up your DC - so firewall/router/VPN connections before the DC, in this case. Then, make sure your DC is communicating with DCs in other sites before bringing up the rest of the infrastructure. It's not that I think that anything *bad* will happen if you do it out of order - but it gave me much more peace of mind when I did that. Kurt ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
