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Hi

We have made new server room in same company floor and we are planning to shift 08 hp and dell rack server to different rack so can you share your old experience with me so that it will be easy for me in server shifting.

7 Spice ups
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I did a weekend forklift of a data center to a colo location. There was a massive amount of prep that went into effect but that made for a smooth move.

Make sure you have everything ready to go, that you have all the proper power outlets setup and ready to use. Be sure you have the proper cooling as well.

Take backups of everything before the move.

If you can document every cable, if you have a SAN be sure you know which cables go where. Have some spare cables as well incase a cable is to long or not long enough. If it were me I would just replace all the cables as a good measure, and I would even go ahead and color coordinate the cables while I have everything down. Maybe something like blue for data, green for SAN traffic, yellow for iDrac/iLO.

Take so many photos of everything, this can give you reference points to what ports were being used.

If you want to get crazy and you are going to have A/B power I would even get proper sized power cords to go from the servers to the power rails. No need for a 10ft cord when I only need to go three feet. Then I would also color coordinate the power cords. I would get blue for the A side and red for the B side. Then anything with a single PDU is black.

Be sure to have plenty of cage nuts, most servers come with snap in rails, but having cage nuts ready won’t hurt.

Have a worse case plan ready to go incase you exceed the time it takes for the move to occur. Or have a plan to rollback the move should something go south.

4 Spice ups
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Our Org have a firm (subsidiary) that designs, build and also relocated server rooms…

Are you looking for a high level plan or in detail ??

Certain requisites are recommended…

  • perform backup
  • label ALL LAN cables
  • ensure power supply and cooling is up
  • ensure enough down time, you do not want to rush certain things
  • ensure safety (remove things blocking path, unplug PDUs or power extensions)
  • plan stages (move power or UPS, move networking appliances, move servers)

It also depends on how accessible are the rooms for racks ?

  • Can you push the existing rack to the new rack location (as close as possible) then do a server dismount & re-mount ??

Plan for contingencies…
Coz most of the time there is no turning back (like I stated above, servers are usually last to move, UPS and networking are already there), there should be plans for contingencies.

  • Depending on the relocation, so usually taking of photo is not required as the plan is usually to know what is what and also label all cables
  • Know how to re-organize the servers and their connections. As diff to having photo and re-create the entire setup…it would be better to understand and know what goes where or plug into where…literally you have LAN cables to worry about…thats why label the cables are very important, sometimes even using colored LAN cables is useful (eg White for LAN, yellow for management or iDRAC, red for DMZ or router, Blue for iSCSI)