Looking at a bear in the face and not sure what to do. We have 3 older Dell R610 servers that need to be replaced. We also need to do quite a few updates/upgrades, I think. I'm trying to make it as cost effective as possible without hampering future growth and/or making us do things all over again in a few months or a year. The main thing that is driving this is, we have ran into sluggishness with our current setup. We are running 3 RDS servers with a session broker doing the load balancing. 12 branches with 60+ users total are accessing them on a daily basis. Here are what I think we may need to upgrade at the moment:

• Dell R610 -> R430 or ?
• vSphere 4 -> 5.5
• Workstation 8 -> Workstation 11
• Equalogic firmware
• Win2k8 server -> Win2012 or Win 10

My initial thought was to just buy new servers and replace the old ones, but that would leave us with an old version of ESXi. Thanks to @scottalanmiller that idea was quickly removed from the options. Any helpful tips or suggestion on this? We are also looking for a consultant that maybe able to help us, but I wanted to see if any of you may have a experience in this area and could point me in a good direction.

I'm sure this isn't enough info, but please ask for more clarification or details.

Thanks

@JaredBusch said:

@MattSpeller said:

It's a bit morbid but I want to the see carnage

SpaceX released the video last time, so I would expect it to come at some point later today or tomorrow.

http://www.space.com/29118-spacex-rocket-first-stage-crashes-during-landing-attempt-video.html

@nadnerB said:

Kudos to MS for the extended support period
Just need some feature adds

• zoom out
• e=mc2 trooper
• photon man
• hoyo hoyo
• stormbilly
• Jack be nimble

@nadnerB I think most of the time I played the original AOE with my friend it always ended with a photo man. Oh, what about the flyingdutchman?

Drinking my second cup of coffee and moving files off of an old decrepit tower to a new Synology NAS. My Sys. Admin is also talking to me, on speaker phone, about some potential consultants for a project we are working on.

@Reid-Cooper said:

Very neat. Meet the day's most popular new desktop wallpaper.

Yeah, people will think you have busted display or wonder why you have a constant glare on your screen.

This is exciting though. Hubble's photos make it look like it could be reddish. Also, the different chemical compounds on the surface and in the atmosphere are thought to make the planet look reddish. Can't wait until July!

Also, I can't wait for Dawn to get out of the dark side of Ceres. Exciting stuff going on in space this year.

@Breffni-Potter Nice work. Do you clean homes. I have a tangle of everything at my house. 2 year old and 9 month old twins make a nice lived in home. Speaking of, do you also do child wrangling?

Seriously, though this is inspiring. I need to do a little TLC to our server racks and room.

@thanksajdotcom said:

@MattSpeller said:

Excellent spaghetti wrangling there

I tried to find a funny picture for "spaghetti wrangling" but it just came up with lots of clothes...Google "spaghetti wrangler" and you'll see what I mean...

@thanksajdotcom I think I"m good. I'll play it safe and take your word for it.

I'm with @MattSpeller it can't be true... It can't...

John from Portland, OR. VP of IT and CIO of CashCo Financial Services. My IT team consists of me and my Sys. Admin. Don't let the title fool you, I have a ton of room to grow in my IT knowledge and probably will be receiving more help than I can give. In any case, I'm glad to be here and hope I can contribute as well as just enjoy the community.