multi-year multi-million infrastructure overhaul

You sure seem like you are the boss!

Awesome thread :)
I was the architect and project manager on the district side. I worked with multiple project managers for each of the vendors that we had in to do the big big stuff (pulling 500,000 feet of cable, etc)

Luckily I had the full support of my boss (IT Director) and the rest of the district administration in implementing this. She had her own projects to worry about. We also moved our student information system to a completely new vendor and she was busy working with the curriculum department aligning our technology goals to state standards.
 
Man, I am really impressed.

You are a boss of the interwebz.;)

I want you around to rebuild after the Zombie apocalypse.

Seriously, what a challenge and job well done. Your students don't know what a great thing you did for their education.

Where is your district.....you don't need to identify the city if you don't want to...looks like southwest to me from the outside pictures.:D
 
cry0n

If you ever hire, let me know, I will come out your way in a jiffy ;)

Love the thread.
 
Awesome thread. We are in the early stages of planning a new office build, and this thread has given me a lot of ideas.

Good to see someone else running Hyper-V! My company is a much smaller scale (150 people right now, but high growth), and I am migrating our clustered environment from 2008 R2 to 2012 R2. I have two Dell R620s running and will be reusing two R610s that are currently still part of the 2008 R2 cluster.
2x 1GB - VM traffic (teamed in Server 2012 R2)
2x 1GB - Live Migration (teamed in Server 2012 R2)
2x 1GB - Host iSCSI (not teamed, EMC PowerPath)
1x 1GB - Management/Heartbeat

I noticed you don't have any cable arms and everything is pretty tight in your server rack. Do you just plan on unplugging everything if you need to do anything hardware related on the server?

We are going to need some sort of TV and video service like you have. I have copied/pasted a few of your posts into my OneNote notebook for the new building, and may be hitting you up with a few PMs to ask more specific questions.

This is a great thread! It took a while to read the whole thing but it was well worth it. Thanks for taking the time to post!

 
cry0n

If you ever hire, let me know, I will come out your way in a jiffy ;)

Love the thread.
I am in the Phoenix area.
FYI I have accepted a new position at a different school district so we are hiring to replace me.
Anyone looking to inherent this environment that you've seen and are at the network engineer level and in the phoenix area PM me and I'll provide the link to our job posting.
 
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I noticed it appears you only have (non sprinkler) fire suppression in the main office? I don't mean that as a criticism, I'm just used to seeing halon/gas systems everywhere and I'm wondering if there is a school/gov reason (ie cost) for not having them?
 
OP: This is amazing. I am doing the same thing (On much smaller scale) in our organization. Blows my mind how people can just perform a 'It works so I dont need to touch it' in regards to cable management, labeling, etc. Bravo to you.
 
I noticed it appears you only have (non sprinkler) fire suppression in the main office? I don't mean that as a criticism, I'm just used to seeing halon/gas systems everywhere and I'm wondering if there is a school/gov reason (ie cost) for not having them?
We have sprinkler systems at the schools per local fire code. It is not cost effective to put FM200 systems in the school MDF's because of the relativly low importance any one schools MDF plays in the overall capability of the network.
However the district office is our central MDF for all servers and internet gear so if it goes down the entire district goes down with it.
The district office also falls into a category of building that being under 5,000 sq ft our local fire code does not 'require' a sprinkler system for that facility. As such, they don't have one. At all.

Because there is NO suppression in that MDF, and it's importance after putting upwards of $1million of infrastructure and upgrades into that room it was worth it to spend a little bit of money and add an FM200 system to that room.
It now has better fire suppression that the rest of the building that it is in.
 
So for anyone interested I've moved on to a new school district. Here is my new baby.





:D
 
Schools? I bet all that is running Novell Netware. :D

Seriously, that looks like one hell of an awesome setup though especially for a school district.
 
Looks terrible! Must he rough to have all of that emc nexus and cisco shit. Must not be public schools
 
Looks terrible! Must he rough to have all of that emc nexus and cisco shit. Must not be public schools
It is indeed a public school district. I only operate in the public sector K-12 space.
What you are seeing is an EMC VNX and a Nimble SAN. (2) UCS chassis, multiple UCS C series servers that we're migrating workloads to the blades. Also harder to see are redundant ASR 9K's, redundant Nexus 7K's, 5K's, and 2K's in the rear of the racks.
I believe we are up to about 20 5508 WLC's, and somewhere around 12 Ironport appliances I'm not quite sure since I'm still getting a handle on the entire environment.
 
It is indeed a public school district. I only operate in the public sector K-12 space.
What you are seeing is an EMC VNX and a Nimble SAN. (2) UCS chassis, multiple UCS C series servers that we're migrating workloads to the blades. Also harder to see are redundant ASR 9K's, redundant Nexus 7K's, 5K's, and 2K's in the rear of the racks.
I believe we are up to about 20 5508 WLC's, and somewhere around 12 Ironport appliances I'm not quite sure since I'm still getting a handle on the entire environment.

Has to be a huge district then. Just crazy that amount of stuff.
 
I'll post some more pics of datacenter1 (pictured above) when I get back into work on Monday. It's a bit messy right now because the techs are using it as a staging area for a few thousand laptops that have come in. It's the only storage area not full right now.

I know some of my engineers just finished upgrading the line cards in the ASR 9k's to 40GbE so I'm anxious for a report on that on Monday.
 
Nimble, EMC, Cisco UCS, Nexus.

Very nice... and here i thought there was no money for hardware in public schools.
 
MWR reading the grand finale
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Best worklog I've read in years, holy shit. Where did you learn to do all that experience wise besides your certs? If you don't mind the question, what's your pay range? Inquiring minds and all that.
 
Best worklog I've read in years, holy shit. Where did you learn to do all that experience wise besides your certs? If you don't mind the question, what's your pay range? Inquiring minds and all that.

thank you. :D
I taught myself. The certs I've gotten along the way are to have something on paper (other than experience) to show for all my knowledge.


--------------------------

As promised, my new stuff:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1040904057&postcount=12243
 
Now that's just sick...:)

I can't imagine managing something like that:) How do you know where everything is plugged and how traffic should flow and....

That's just a whole another level from what I'm used to:)

Matej
 
What's your new title?
Network Supervisor.

Although that will probably change soon. My team originally consisted of just the network team, however the Server and Infrastructure teams have been moved under me recently so who knows.
 
Network Supervisor.

Although that will probably change soon. My team originally consisted of just the network team, however the Server and Infrastructure teams have been moved under me recently so who knows.

What we know here is that you should be seeing more pictures of this new gig. I think we all want to see some more pictures of those racks.. I see some good stuff :D
 
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