Happy New Year! I hope you enjoyed the holidays!
I took time off for the holidays… not as much as I’d have liked to, but enough to enjoy it.
What’d I do?
The cobbler finally got a chance to tend to his own shoes, at least infrastructure wise.
A few years ago, I caught that MS was giving away a license to Windows System Center Core, and I realized I had enough retired hardware to cobble together a hobby-level host. I then did a Physical->Virtual on my small network of Windows 2003 based servers that I ran the NHSPUG website from.
The setup was nice, actually… all three virtual machines ran with room to spare on what was originally an old client-class PC. With dynamic RAM turned on and all three VMs cranking, they occasionally managed to consume nearly a third of the host’s 8GB of RAM.
Having recently had opportunity to get a hold of platform MSDN licensing, I upgraded my entire home network infrastructure by two platform generations across the board.
Seriously… Windows Server 2003 -> 2012 R2 64, SQL 2005 -> 2014, SharePoint WSS3 -> SharePoint Foundation 2013.
Almost all of it was build, replace, rip… build new VMs, integrate them into the domain, migrate data & config as needed, then shut down the systems they replace. The fun one was SharePoint WSS 3.0 upgrading to Foundation 2013. I had to bounce the content databases off a spare 2010 farm I had left over from a project at work. It was nice that it was possible to do that, given that the 2010 farm was a different domain. It’s amazing how much you can get done in short order when you are a one-man IT shop… the communications overhead savings alone is unreal.
The hard part is that newer software in the 64bit range uses much more system resources, so I have extended hosting not just to my System Center, but also to two Windows 8.1 Pro systems running Hyper-V, just to spread out the necessary load and provide some critical system redundancy.
With that, only obvious thing externally is that the Granite State NH SharePoint Users Group website ( http://www.granitestatesharepoint.org ) is now SharePoint 2013 based.
Internally, things generally seem a touch faster, smoother… maybe that’s just psychological, but I notice the difference, even if my wife & kids think it just functions as always, as expected.
I guess the irony in this is that my hobby infrastructure backlog is knocked down a few more notches than I thought I would ever get to… (yes, I took time off from work, and, to chill, I did some of what I do at work.) now my hobby development backlog has new possibilities and subsequently grown substantially.
One of the first things I’ve got to take care of is the few services the SharePoint upgrade has caused… the NHSPUG site still has some cosmetic issues I want to sort out. My Windows Phone apps that integrated with the WSS3 site are now broken, and I have some jiggering to do with my dev environment before I can even diagnose them. That doesn’t even cover some of the things I want to do with the NHWPAD group and my hobby/portfolio projects (e.g. Jimmy Sudoku).