Man, it’s been a crazy week.  I’m going to try to recap the week and get my brain unloaded.  Bear with me.

This Tuesday we attempted a P2V (Physical-to-Virtual) conversion on our domain controller.  It worked, but not as well as I expected.  We wound up losing the SYSVOL share (where all your group policy stuff is kept) during the conversion.  We still had our physical machine present, so we fired it back up and all was well.  As a remedy for the next time we try this, I set up a second domain controller and stuck it in one of the IDFs.  Hopefully the domain data will replicate from the new DC to the old, and if not, we can always start from scratch with a new VM.

Also on Tuesday, we started implementing run logs on our servers.  Nothing fancy, just a simple Wordpad document that we will update any time we do something to the server.  This will come in very handy if we ever need to backtrack in the event of trouble.  I’ve been slacking pretty badly on proper documentation, so this is part of my process to get into the “documentation groove,” if you will…

Wednesday - We moved our QuickBooks install to a separate server.  For those of you who don’t use QuickBooks 2006 or have an earlier version, QB2006 actually uses an agent to access your company file if you host it on a server, and you get some very fast multi-user action as a result.  However, the server that our QB lived on was also (at one time) our Exchange server, our file server, our Antivirus server, and a domain controller all at the same time (yuck).  Over time things really started to get sticky on that machine, so we’ve been sticking our other services inside VMs and just letting the file server host some of those VMs.  As a result, things are running cleaner and more reliably.

Today (Friday) I spent bit of the morning talking to Ed as we tried to get a second firewall to work properly on our network.  For whatever reason, we didn’t have a lot of luck, but we DID narrow it down to the firewall as being the issue, and not something else.  On Ed’s recommendation, I’m going to give ISA a run and see how it flies; perhaps maybe we’ll just go that route instead.  Big props to Ed for going above and beyond to help me out through this process.

I was also VERY pleased when I looked out the window of my house today.  I could see fresh buds starting to form on the trees outside.  YEAH!! :-)  You have no idea how ready I am for spring.  Hopefully we won’t drop back into the 10-20s during March.