Lots of progress...

So I think that we have determined that I am one of the world's worst bloggers. I just forget to take the time to sit down and do it. So, without further ado, I'll start in on the latest developments.

New hardware is in place.

Well, new to MLS hardware anyways... If you remember MLS currently runs on an 8 year old dual PIII 833 mhz server with 2 GB of RAM. It currently shares this power with several other websites, with FTP and mail services. I have a second server where I set up several VMs using MS virtual server and have been slowly moving some of these services to those VMs.

A couple weeks ago, we were going through the datacenter at work and cleaning out a bunch of old servers that had been decommissioned. Among them was a stack of Compaq DL360 G1 servers. We set them out on the loading dock for the recyclers to come pick up. At that point management told us we could take anything that we wanted. I knew that most of the stuff was pretty useless, (8U server anyone?) but I figured that I could put together one server from all the parts. I was able to put together a 1U DL360 G1 with two PIII 1 Ghz processors and 4 GB of RAM. Company policy requires drives be destroyed, so I couldn't get drives, but I have a pair of spare drives here at home, so that wasn't a big deal. I installed Windows 2003 server R2 and SQL 2005. I took it downtown to the colocation facility and racked it last Friday. The deal I made with the guys at the colo facility is that I have to have everything migrated off the old 2U server by the end of the year and have it out. So there it is, my deadline to get MLS moved over to DNN.. The end of the year.

This new server will be dedicated to MLS on DNN, with maybe a few other smaller websites that will run on DNN as well. I'll still keep the old site online on a VM on the other server, but I'm not sure how much of it will be functional.
I hope that a deal that I'm working on (I'll talk about later) will allow me to afford to purchase a pair of brand new HP G5 dl360s. The way I'm setting things up, migrating from the current servers will be a snap because they are all VMs, so I can just move them over to the new hardware and adjust the resources available to each VM.