Yesterday I did a server re-rack in which I consolidated 8 physical servers from 2 racks into one 45RU rack and added some new equipment.

The new equipment is a new Dell EqualLogic SAN which will be conected via 2 10GB ethernet switches and 2 Dell R710 Servers with 64GB of RAM a piece. As you can see I’m going cloud.

My server racking and patching skills are slowly improving, I managed to keep all the power entry to the right side of the rack and all the data and KVM entry to the left side of the rack.

I also did something I hadn’t done before in configuring Cisco VLAN Trunking over EtherChannel for the  connection between my 2 Cisco Gigabit core switches. This took a little to configure because I had difficulty with the port-channel going into errdisabled mode but a copy st run and reload of both switches got it working.

When I first started populating my server room about 7 yrs ago I had no VLAN capable switches so cables were slung from one rack to the nearest router. Now with VLAN capable switches with trunking I can now make any port on any switch available for any network which has tidied things up enormously with one downside: When you repatch cables it can take a while to get your core switches re-configured so that every server and device is connected to the correct VLAN.

For me the whole process(re-racking and cabling 10 servers and reconfiguring the Switches) took 13hours with the assitance of a helper for 10hrs.

Now on to a virtualized environment. Boo Yahh!