PC support jobs.

[ogden]

Originally Posted by TSM

I see the love of VMWare but costly to impliment with full DR & HF. Trying to convice the directors that i need a SAN and a pair of servers to start sorting out our systems is hard, they dont want to dish out ?15k for a basic setup.

The thing to remember is that virtualisation isn't appropriate for everything. If the money you save on tin doesn't cover the cost of the storage system, the virtualisation software and the ESX hosts themselves, it's probably not worth doing.

Originally Posted by ogden

The thing to remember is that virtualisation isn't appropriate for everything. If the money you save on tin doesn't cover the cost of the storage system, the virtualisation software and the ESX hosts themselves, it's probably not worth doing.

Someone else sees sense too!

For infrastrucutre (proxies, smtp hosts, etc, etc) there is a lot to be said for load balancing switches and a bunch of DL140's instead of huge mutli-redundant systems.

*Looks up at monitoring system, ah a proxy servers broken. We should look at that in the next week or so I suppose...

The users don't notice, and nether would we if the monitoring system didn't tell us. Seamless! This is what it should be IMHO.

Working in IT isn't all fun and dumper trucks full of money that people advertise it as.

You can easily find yourself working all day, though lunch and beyond your leave time and even to the point of being around the next morning when people come in *if* it all goes wrong. Your job is to make sure that doesn't happen!

As others have said about qualifications, don't go and study them to get the piece of paper. I've interviewed people with lots of qualifications on paper (one had even done the written part of a Cisco CCIE!), but no practical experience to back them up even when the exam writers say you should have 3+ years experience on the product.

Oh, and look for an area of IT you would enjoy. Its not just using windows for desktop support and windows servers. I enjoy Networking, Unix and security, so thats what I do.


Dan

i have no qualifications at all, and i work in IT support, mainly supporting user hardware (desktops, laptops, blackberrys etc) its a very interesting way to make money and the challenges are allways errr challenging, i would agree that working in IT you will be expected to pull the occasional all nighter or to work at weekends. hell all the really big jobs should happen when the company is asleep (the weekends late nights etc) so you can expect to be working all sorts of strange hours. its also a thankless job. no one ever comes n says "your doing a great job" they only come to shout at you when the email server gos down for 10mins while you fix it lol. so a thick skin is recomended.

all in all i enjoy my work tho

[fizzwheel]

Originally Posted by ogden

The thing to remember is that virtualisation isn't appropriate for everything. If the money you save on tin doesn't cover the cost of the storage system, the virtualisation software and the ESX hosts themselves, it's probably not worth doing.

Very True.

I've offset the cost of new hardware against taking out a maintenance contract on 90 odd servers that have no HP maintenance cover on them anymore. Also I've offset it again, by the cost saving involved in not upgrading our Air Conditioning unit as its over worked and offset it again in reducing the amount of power we draw from the local substation which again is on capacity and TBH its warm enough to cook an egg on !!

For our company is makes huge sense to consolidate a whole load of 1U servers that are out of date, under powered and have no warranty cover onto a few blade servers attatched to a SAN that already has spare capacity on it. So I guess I was lucky that I had infrastructure not doing anything that I could use.

[TSM]

Originally Posted by ogden

The thing to remember is that virtualisation isn't appropriate for everything. If the money you save on tin doesn't cover the cost of the storage system, the virtualisation software and the ESX hosts themselves, it's probably not worth doing.

Problem is we have high usage requirements which puts some virtulisation out the window. High DB activity that takes a complete DL380G5 for itself. On the whole, several things run off the 4TB NAS, problem is if that goes down. But all in all, i dont want to virtulise half a rsed. I just use the free CPU cycles of the file servers to run a few non critical things. I like having several servers of the same type so if there is hardware failure then i can just swap things around, plus HP stuff is fairly reliable and good support.

[MiniMac]

Really interesting topic, I'm just making my 1st steps in IT. Supporting desktops / servers for a games company. Just need more stuff to do sometimes

TL84 works here too.

[TSM]

Just note that some companies are so tight with money that some IT bods have previously just built servers from cheep desktop peices. Im still migrating, budget does not allow all to be done in one go.

The pics attached are the tat i have to deal with, small scale i know, but slowly its getting better, should have seen what they had here when i started, was two desks, with desktop computers on top and underneath and some even stacked on top of each other. But things have come on a long way since i convinced them that proper HP kit is the way to go, but still having to fit it around what money is available all while keeping a 24x7 operation working at full pelt.

[timwilky]

Firstly think long and hard about the type of company you want to work within. I have worked for small SME's where I was on call 25 hours a day (yes I know 25) 8 days a week. Was responsible for everything and authorised to do nothing.

Great for learning as you get to do everything.

I have worked in a large global organisation for the past 24 years. It has evolved from the employed by the local site responsible for their IT into a large IT provider in its own right. Very structured. Defined roles/responsibilities. However, out of this comes the drive to reduce costs. Some of this is achieved by high cost investment in technologies, consolidation, relocation etc. But a real biggy is in the delivery of support. We now buy this in. A single provider globally, but from a number of locations. (language). In the case of the UK. our 5000 users now get their first line support from Kuala Lumpur.

Okay thanks for all your responses. Some of you are losing me though.

[ogden]

Originally Posted by TSM

Problem is we have high usage requirements which puts some virtulisation out the window. High DB activity that takes a complete DL380G5 for itself.

DBs are a good example of something that really doesn't suit virtualisation particularly well at the moment. As well as being very resource hungry, there are also serious support issues with VMWare (don't support MCS using iSCSI) and Microsoft (don't support cluster nodes with system disk vmdks on external storage).

It's bleedin wonderful for things like collapsing multiple domain controllers onto the same tin though.