If you can read this, that means my server move this weekend was successful.
For the record, what I did was physically move my hosted-at-home VMWare GSX server to the shiny new datacenter in Brooklyn.
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The main thing that changed was moving from a Linksys router port forwarding to the VMWare NAT Service. This involved changing the ip addresses for each guest which turned out to be moderately painful when it came to Active Directory and Exchange.
I ended up having to create a whole new virtual NIC for the Exchange server. System Manager would not even come up since it wasn’t connecting to the AD controllers. Let me tell you there’s nothing more frustrating than having a broken server, where the server admin console doesn’t even start.
Things are going ok at the moment, the VMWare NAT service has crashed a few times already which is very not cool, but since there’s a new version of VMWare Server out in beta, I’m confident than an upgrade will probably solve it. Also, while less than ideal, setting Windows to auto-restart the service is working well enough.
</technical section>
Why did I do it?
- No more worrying about my home internet connection going out on me while I’m out of the house or on vacation.
- ~100X Faster
- Frees up home bandwidth for expanded use of FolderShare (more on this later)
- Less power usage ($!) and noise at home