New Network for the New Year
Now that my DL380 is stacked with a total of 10 gigs of ram, it's time to revamp my network. A majority of my servers are still in Silicon Valley (San Jose, specifically) at a fantastic colo company, Silicon Valley Web Hosting so in order to have as little downtime as possible, I'm going to temporarily push that one server to its limit and run a slimmed down virtualized network on it. Since I like my servers to be within driving distance, I'm choosing to migrate the network to Austin, TX (likely at onramp.) Granted Austin is a good 6 hours away, but colocation is much more affordable there than it is in Louisiana and any reason is a good enough reason to visit Austin.
All these new servers will require new names which is cool because the current names of my servers are a random hodgepodge of Cajun references like ROUX (the base for gumbo), BOUDIN (a delicious Cajun sausage) and BOUDREAUX (a famous Cajun last name). I'd like a little more order so I decided to get my theme together beforehand. That way, I don't have to invest time into thinking about names when I create new servers. As I was sitting in the parking lot at Acadian Food Mart in Duson, LA, I decided on the following theme: the names of small cities, towns and villages in Acadiana that are short and double as common first names or nicknames (omg I'm a nerd.) As I was documenting the list of potentials in an email to my business partner and best friend, Brandon, I figured why the hell not document them in Google Maps :D And so I did...
So the list currently consists of Cade, Leroy, Mack, Katy, Effie, Ellis, Esther, Perry, Cecilia, Elba, Lucy, Henry, Ariel, Vick, Chloe, Lucas, Oliver, Scott, Milton, Jacoby, Brooks, Oscar, Louisa and Coon.
"Coon?" you may be asking yourself. Yes, I know two Coons, one Coonie and one T-Coon. All of whom got their nickname from the controversial epithet "coonass." So far, a few of the roles are: VMware Server, FSMO DC, Backup DC, SQL Server 2008, Backup SQL Server (Mirroring), IIS Web Server, Windows Dev Server, LAMP Server, and uhhh I'll come up with a few more once I get my other servers from SVWH. Did you know that Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition allows 4 VM installs per physical license? Fortunately, I was able to obtain one of those bad boys at a conference last year and now I have pretty much more than enough Windows 2008 instances. Totally can't wait to try Core w/Powershell.