Whoami

As this is the first post, let me start to write who I am.

I am David, working in IT since 1998, starting with basic helpdesk support and an Architectural background.

After 4 years I started to work in the Back Office where we had to care of AD, Exchange, File and print servers, ... After a couple of years I moved to another company as I was blocked in my function to give 3rd line support for all the products they sell.
As I didn't really feel ok in that position, I moved again to a costumer where I started to help in their migration from w2k to XP and Exchange migration. After the migration I continued to provide global end-user support, making scripted pc installations, software distribution without admin rights, AD and Exchange.

Since 2007 I moved to the Infrastructure team. A difficult decision, but one of the best decisions ever made. No more clients, only infrastructure to maintain. Daily tasks are installing and maintaining all HP servers (blades & rack servers), HP Storage (EVA 5000/8000/8100), San switches and after a couple of months I took over the virtual infrastructure (ESX 3.01).

With mainly a Windows background, no linux or esx knowledge at all an entire new world opened.
After following the ESX 3 Install and configure, I started to update our hosts to 3.0.2. A couple months later, with some help and a lot of googling, a design was made how our virtual infrastructure should look like with 3.5. We started to use clusters, HA, DRS, ... and most important, scripted installations. Using the UDA appliance we deployed our 10 esx servers fully configured and ready to use. Meanwhile I followed the DSA course to get some more troubleshooting and background knowledge.

Since june I'm reviewing our current virtual infrastructure as we are moving into the direction of an almost complete virtual datacenter.
With vsphere arriving in may, I immediately had to start to test all new features (as I could not participate in the beta program) and see how they could improve our infrastructure.
As I'm not an update person, I rewrote and adapted our existing kickstart scripts to easily move to vsphere.

That's about it, now let's post some issues and solutions we've tackled during our migration.

Cheers,

David