Haha!

So let's start working through this as a refresher.

Biggest thing from yesterday...

You still think it's a good risk not to have a second domain controller. I was able to stop the paperwork, so that will indeed save me $800 or so on a license and a few thousand on another server.

The only other thing I thought of was that if the server goes down, I lose my DC, and files serer, and mail server. But this new thing should be pretty darn reliable, so that's probably a good risk to take as well.

I am up and ready now.

I already purchased the server, so I am going to keep it in-house for now.

My head is still spinning a little bit from yesterday.

I spoke to xByte. Their SSD drives do indeed work with the DELL servers. They have a yellow exclamation point in OMSA, but apparently the front panels works as expected, so that might be an option.

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller Do you join PC's to an Azure AD? Or does that concept kinda go away?

That's what I want to know, too. Keep in mind we're using a 2003 Server from 2003. So all this stuff is new to me.

Hmm, I left work, picked up kids from soccer, and came home. And this thread quieted. Let's keep it going!!

Having another beer before I leave work to pick up the kids from soccer.

Trying to gather everything I learned and changed today about server, storage and ... stuff.

Nice forums everyone!!

BTW, specifically what 3rd party RAID card would you recommend going with?

Seems like even from this site people aren't keen on the H310.

I reached out to xByte and EDGE directly to inquire about their SSDs. But perhaps I should upgrade my PERC card regardless.

I guess whatever the model equivalent to the entry level H710 would be fine for me.

@scottalanmiller said:

File servers often need to be local, but not always. We moved to tools like SharePoint / OneDrive for Business and ownCloud and did away with traditional file servers ourselves. But that is not for everyone.

What kind of file serving do you do? Our AD is 100% on Microsoft Azure and has been for some time now. That's easy to move to 100% colo or hosted. Email can go hosted very, very easily. File serving is your only potetial challenge.

Right. E-mail I know 100% I can do. I just want to do that in the future. (Though co-locatiing the MDaemon server would not be out of the question in the near future.)

We do all sorts of file hosting. A lot of office files, but also all sorts of other business-related documents. Peachtree. Desktop DB files. Things like that. Is that what you meant?

@scottalanmiller said:
Depends on your specific needs. Generally no, but generally is 70% of the time, guesstimate. NTG went 100% colo about ten years ago, zero in house servers. Then went 100% cloud, nearly there now. So zero physical servers anywhere.

Is it still an AD environment?

Just out of curiosity...

Why not add more threads to this, right?

If I were colo this new server. Is that a total relocation?

Or do you still need to keep something in house?

@scottalanmiller said:

Nice, I'm in Granada, Nicaragua, these days.

Any Wegman's there?

@scottalanmiller said:

Ever go to the Wegmans there in Princeton? I put in their server in 2005. Wow that was a long time ago. I lived in North Brunswick in 2006.

Small world, right?

Yeah I used to go there all the time. Haven't been there in a while. That's about 5 minutes from me.

@scottalanmiller said:

What town? So glad that I don't live up there with those issues. We don't power or Internet outage issues like that here in Central America.

Lawrenceville, NJ. More closely between Trenton and Pricenton.

My next incarnation of moves will be offsite.

For this one, I wanted to keep everything here still.

When the power went down, we did co-lo the server, and no one liked it. Of course, it could have been better configured. But just too many moves at once.

Who me? East Coast. Right in between Philly and NYC.

@scottalanmiller said:

They aren't "certified", they are actually Dell drives.

I think they ones the sell are EDGE brand??

@MattSpeller said:

Cheap recertified Dell servers - used pretty extensively around here & well regarded

I saw on Spiceworks that their SSDs are certified or something, so maybe their drives might fix my original issue.

@MattSpeller said:

@BRRABill said:

week-long power losses.

Good grief

Notice the -es in that.

Happened twice in the span of 3 years.

I guess that is a good barometer of how we operate here. We knew the storms were coming, so I made sure everyone had a alternative e-mail address. We were also able to access our backups in the cloud, so I could grab any files anyone needed.

Kludgy, but it works.

@scottalanmiller said:

Xbyte has the T320 as well.

Who is this Xbyte, exactly?

@StrongBad said:

Have you looked into hosted email options? For just fifteen users that would be pretty cheap and would eliminate an entire workload from your servers that you have in house. Most hosted email offerings are about four dollars a month, so that would be sixty dollars a month and cover the software, hosting, support, storage and whatnot. Might be worth looking into that option now while doing a big refresh. That would potentially really change what you are looking at as your needs internally.

I've thought about it, but for various reasons I do not want to go that route now. MDaemon has been great for us.

It's definitely in the future cards, though. We've been burned a few times with week-long power losses.

@StrongBad said:

Don't forget my video game too!

That I never saw.