Lately, I've been helping my uncle with the computer network at his office. Not that long ago, he purchased a new server and three new computers to help him move on to electronic charting. It has taken a while, but now he's pretty much all setup to move forward with it. I've been taking the time to read up on how to setup and administer a Windows 2008 R2 server. Same stuff different name to me really. But there are some nice things that I'm going to exploit in the coming weeks.
First up will be Hyper-V. One of the machines in the office is running Windows XP, but hasn't been used in a long time. It does however contain some important information related to billing. Using disk2vhd from sysinternals, I'm going to move that to a virtual machine and plop it down onto Hyper-V. Once done, we can recycle that hunk of junk and have easy access to the data.
Next up will be shadow copies. I know, this isn't new. But since I don't want to be taking calls from their office whenever they need something restored from backups on the server, this should save me a lot of time. I'll be recycling a disk from one of the other machines as a dedicated shadow copy repository. I guess this is best practice, but it'll also make it easy to keep the shadow copies from taking up space on the backup volume.
There are other things I'm mulling over too. RDS host sounds interesting, though he doesn't need it. Active Directory is another. I'm really drawn to using Active Directory simply to manage passwords and password policies. But, this for sure will cause more calls to me if they forget a password or if the AD has problems. Not appealing. The trade offs are probably worth it though. Argh... Maintaining a balance of ease of maintenance and use of technology is a tough one in this case.
All in all, it feels good to be helping him out and to learn something new.
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