Data Center Migration with lot of Printers

[brian_31]

Hello:

We are migrating our datacentre within the city to another location. Environment is full of RP Servers..Nclass, Lclass with EMC SAN. There are a large amount of printers also. This is a MC Service Guard environment. Could you all please guide me with respect what kind of prep work i need to do? Especially with the printer and EMC SAn what i need to do. I have never worked on a project like this..so please provide your valuable inputs.

Thanks

Brian.

[Hanwant Verma_1]

Read article on this link

http://www.veritas.com/consulting/StorageServerManagement/

Hanwant

[Gavin Clarke]

First let me say that I've only ever done small moves, a few computers in a new computer room, that sort of level.

I'm surprised more people haven't picked up on this thread.

Questions that spring to mind for me are:

What is staying?
Are you moving everything or are the network switches or printers staying/being replaced?
If you're moving everything then you need to think about practical considerations like power requirements, physical space to put the computers in. My thinking here is that the network, servers and printers themselves don't really know or care where they are in reality as long as they can still talk to each other, they've got power and they're not too hot.

Alot of the networking considerations can be taken care of by careful labelling if you're moving everything. Beware of the 100m rule are there going to be servers that are further away from each other than they were.

Are you choosing the colour of the walls? Seems like a funny question but there is a safety aspect which has been mentioned in the forum before.

Are there any weight considerations are particularly heavy servers/arrays all going to be in one place?

Are you moving tape libraries can they be placed away from the disks that they are being used to backup?

This really is a wide open topic. I hope you find some good advice.

[Geoff Wild]

Are you relocating the servers as well? or are they migrating to new servers, new san, etc...

If the latter - then you have a ton of work.

If they are all moving - then it should be a piece of cake - All you need to do is ensure the new data centre is atleast on par with space and power and ups as the previous one.

Then shutdown/pack your servers/infrastructure, move them, unpack servers/infrastructure, and bring them up in an orderly fashion. IE - you need your network up first, then the Storage/SAN - then bring up your servers.

I've never done a data centre move (other then move within the same data centre) but have been involved in a large office move between cities - 4 floors from one city to another - in a weekend.

Rgds...Geoff

[brian_31]

We are going to have the same servers. we are just going to relocate the data centre. But we have got lot of printers to remove and reconnect and EMC as well. should i be prepared for doing vgexport/vgimport? shd i do fbackup/frecover? pl advise where i shd start? what shd i do for printers?

Please help

Regards

brian.

[brian_31]

oopss..sorry..actually we are going to do both. we are going to have some old servers and then we are getting some new RP servers which we have to migrate the data too. we have to move all these printers and this site is very dependent on printers attched to HP-UX boxes.

Thanks

brian

[Gavin Clarke]

If you can arrange to make_tape_recovery for HPUX machines, and backup data using your favoured means then that would be good, it will give you a bit of protection against things going wrong.

More than likely all these servers have regular backup routines anyway so it may just be a case of timing it so that their regular backups have completed and any that haven't you could try taking another. This all depends on your backup environment, you might have an ignite server/servers for instance and you may well take hot backups of your databases.

Printers are pretty well behaved in my experience you can generally take them somewhere else without too much trouble.

[Rick Garland]

Done a couple of large data center moves. Both times had the services from HP.

We took inventory, helped some with the packing (actually, mostly watched), ride across town, unload (again, mostly watched), verified all was functioning on power up.

The HP services were good. They got the moving company, they did an inventory, they worked the logistics of the whole thing.

[Gavin Clarke]

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=892779

This thread has Geoff Wild's name on it.

Do you think this migration technique would also work for subtle changes in hardware Geoff? (I suspect the answer is yes)

[Geoff Wild]

Yes - the thread that Gavin mentions will work for printer migration between servers - for jet direct devices.

For migration to new servers - you will need to document your existing servers very well - things like kernel params, map files with a vgexport -p -v -s -m /tmp/vgXX.map ,/etc/fstab, application startup scripts, PATH, prfiles, etc.

You might want to also use a tool like cfg2html:

http://come.to/cfg2html

to assist in documentation...

Rgds...Geoff

[Steve Lewis]

We moved 12 servers and storage 200 miles back in 2002.

The worst part was labelling up all of the cables and documenting what was connected to what, things like which is lan0, lan1, lan2, console lan, web console, serial console, modem port, etc, which SCSI cable was plugged into which tape drive (if they are not plugged or screwed in).

It helps to take detailed photographs of the front and back of each cabinet.

In the whole move we only had one disk fail, out of several hundred. Not a bad result, I think.

If you have any in-cabinet UPSs to be unplugged, then you will need some specialist help.

Check the ceiling and door height - I once had a 2m cabinet which wouldn't go into the elevator upright - it had to be squeezed in on the diagonal.

I also recommend 2 types of backup for each server, plus the make_recoveries.

You may need access to amend your DNS database on the day, if you don't currently have access. IP address changes for printers may be an issue.

[brian_31]

All:

Thank you so much. I will just leave this thread open for some ideas..Thanks again for all the replies..

Just curious..while moving the printers' IP may as well change..does that mean we have to configure each and every printer?

Thanks

brian

[Geoff Wild]

Depends on how the printers were configured - if you used host names - then you should be fine - just update DNS - but if you used ip addresses - then you will have to re-add them to the spooler...

Rgds...Geoff

[Jan van den Ende]

Brian,

perhaps I have a slightly skewed view of this (mainly VMS focos) but:


This is a MC Service Guard environment.
and

we are going to have some old servers and then we are getting some new RP servers which we have to migrate the data to


This gives you an excellent chance to duplicate our scheme.

Install your new machines.

Arrange network connections.
If they are just for the migration, they do not need to be high-capacity, just commercilly available rent-lines will do.

Add your new systems to your cluster.

Move half of your SAN to the new location.

Rebuild redundancy.

Move other half.

Move (and/or remove, as appropriate) your old systems.

DONE migrating without downtime.

Just check & doublecheck the correctness of each step before the next, and DO NOT hurry!

Been there, done that:
( http://www.openvms.org/stories.php?story=03/11/28/7758863 )

It is up to you to 'translate' those actions to MCSG & HPUX.

Prepare well, think about ANYTHING that could go wrong, and how to cope with it.

DO NOT hurry, and DO NOT let yourself BE hurried!

Success.

.. and DO report the proceedings!

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[Granite]

Hi Brain.,

Proper workouts,plans and schedules can yield you 100% success data-centre location shifts. We did 3 months b4, but we didnt changed any system-level configuration changes.May this URL helps you,

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=967533

Regds, Granite