@travisdh1 said in Moving from Exchange Online Plan 1 to In House Exchange 2016:
@JaredBusch said in Moving from Exchange Online Plan 1 to In House Exchange 2016:
@magroover said in Moving from Exchange Online Plan 1 to In House Exchange 2016:
@travisdh1 what self hosted service?
He doesn't have them.. that was the point of my querying WTF he was saying. He mixed his sentence up horribly.
Ah yeah, I do that quite often
What DID you mean? LOL
@travisdh1 what self hosted service?
Does everyone here pretty much use Office 365 for email, then?
And if it EVER goes down even for a second LOL. I don't know guys, I can't decide if another failed attempt is worth the strife it would cause me. Everyone here is happy and I am at a point where its just irrelevant.
It's akin to the saying "happy wife, happy life". I have left the writing on the while as to say "this is not at all what I recommend". I will have to ponder this a little further.
Sorry was engaged with user needs.
Honestly I don't think you could underestimate the way these guys want what they want, regardless of the counseling and leadership or cost containment/reduction before them.
I've been at much more pragmatic companies where there was dwindling revenue and stagnated growth.
However, I will ponder a return meeting. Wish I could sneak a camera in this, or live stream it here.
@JaredBusch If I came back and said I need a new $15,000 server to make this work, they would tell me to do it. Almost a guarantee.
Actually thinking about doing just that and reporting back here.
@JaredBusch on top of the fact that for 2 years they were lied two after rejecting the previous IT guys proposal to move to the cloud. They were so upset about that I nearly wished I hadn't told them.
I saw no reason not to shoot straight though.
@JaredBusch LOL. I used much bigger numbers than that. There are 3 partners, all of which are over 70, one is 83.
The prevailing response was "we don't do things cheap to save money, we don't cut corners". And then a ridiculous amount of speculation about who would hack our cloud based email accounts.
Maybe I am not expressing how demoralized I was from all of this. If I could have started here before the previous IT guy MAYBE I could have made the case.
The bottom line is that these guys are old school and can afford to force everyone to do things based on their archaic standards.
Relevant Example; we have employees who drive 5 hours here each way for a Monday meeting, every week. There is sufficient bandwidth for a great video conferencing solution. They want them here so they can "look em right in the eyeball".
They aren't complete idiots though. The state of West Virginia regular sends a helicopter to pick them up whenever there is a dam issue and they want them there onsite.
I made the best pitch of my life. I think they started to hate me before I gave up.
@JaredBusch I totally agree. Email is inherently and insecurely passed through the internet. After the last meeting I had I can't imagine giving it another go. I was pretty explicit that there were going to be 2 to 3 weeks of long hours, overtime, etc. "Lets get er done" was pretty much the owner's response.
It had me pretty upset yesterday but I got over it now. It was a 3 hour meeting. In the end I will likely be praised for finally getting things to the place they THOUGHT they were.
@JaredBusch Im actually an employee here, unfortunately. Archaic thinking. Unbreakable mentality about the cloud.
When I started here they said "Thats our mail server" After lunch I had them around a table saying "No it isn't" And there was a list of other lies the previous IT guy told while paying the bill on his own credit card. I imagine to avoid meetings that end with ridiculous mandates. Maybe $200/month bill to make your $80k/year job easier. IDK. Bad thinking on both sides there.
It's their company and I am their employee. I tell them what they should do, but I do what I am told. At least I will log some overtime.
I did spend the first couple months straightening out database issues and making changes to applications they previously had developed with a contractor. So I feel like some of my time was productive here. And its paying the bills for now.
I think its part fear of the cloud and part CAPEX mentality. I have no idea why they went with a lease. They have the cash.
@JaredBusch I had all of that firepower ready in our meeting yesterday. We have some gold old boys here that never wanted to be in "that cloud". They also wanted to clamp down on the use of Dropbox.
Office 365's backend has come a long way and from a compliance standpoint I can't really imagine using anything else i.e G Suite, because what else is left?
@DustinB3403 I've been thinking about investing more time in using CentOS as a premise-based server. I am not whether there are more opportunities for sysadmin or for app development, which has been my more recent role. Managing the actual LOB apps used and customizing, doing reports.
@DustinB3403 would be the first time I had to do that short of Small Business Server. Also the first time I would have just 1 DC. Then again; 20 users. This is pretty ridiculous but I guess it will give me something to do here. I cleared up all their other issues quickly and mostly sit here applying for other jobs. Ha!
@scottalanmiller well that's encouraging. Thats what I have picked up from reading.
What's the best way to get file storage into a new VM? Can it directly access live storage or is it still some kind of VHD file?
I will have the OS drive array run Hyper-V and storage 2 servers to stay under the licensing limit. Server A will be DC and a file share. Or perhaps A is the DC, B is the file server a C is the Exchange server.
Is it common practice to virtualize the file storage in a VHD file or just access that array directly from the guest OS?
@scottalanmiller That was right as my job changed and I didn't work directly on server projects. It just left a terrible taste in my mouse. I use Xen for everything in home lab and otherwise use hosted VPS.
@DustinB3403 I was going to use Hyper-V for the experiece and to leave this place on that platform when I move on later this year hopefully to a better place. Resumes out every where.
On premium storage Virtual Server would still be 10x slow than bare metal 10 years ago. It was at a time when direct i/o to storage was just starting to come out I think. This hardware is somewhat embarrassing. I will have to get and post the specs. Couldnt have been $2,000 at the time.
@scottalanmiller I assumed it was something we didn't need, but wanted to ask just in case there was a "gotcha".
@DustinB3403 Xenserver is my primary experience.
I used Virtual Server 2003 and 2008 Hyper-V and it was always terrible 10 years ago. I have used Hyper-V but not really in the last few years, and I have read that it really has hit its stride.
The storage access always was ridiculously slow, so I am just left with the feeling of not trusting virtualized storage on Microsoft. There is only about 700GB of file storage data.
@DustinB3403 fully aware of what virtualization is, have been running hypervisors for 15+ years 
Since the server is 3 years old and low end, and because my storage is a basic SAS RAID Mirror I wasnt sure how it perform. The previous IT guy installed this and its 2012 R2 bare metal.
