Tips: How to implement real-time configuration server?

Before I decided to be a freelancer, my entire career was spent in the IT department of a large company. In the meantime, there seem to be several factors that are consistent across every company:

- Network administrators are very busy

- Configuring a new server can be time consuming

- Management often changes ideas based on what they want.

Being able to quickly configure new servers can help solve these three problems. First, it reduces the time it takes to configure a new server, allowing you to handle other things. Moreover, if your manager decides to run the Linux operating system instead of Windows, you can quickly convert the machine to Linux.

This is an evolving technology--the era of real-time server configuration. While real-time configuration can be thought of as a rapid deployment technique, it is more like a philosophy of transcending technology. In other words, the roads lead to Rome.

A common technique for real-time configuration is to take advantage of virtualization. Then as an administrator, you should be familiar with the applications used by the organization. You may also be familiar with how you can run these applications. That being the case, you can create a virtual machine template to access a specific type of workload as needed.

For example, suppose you use a lot of Exchange servers in your organization. You want to be able to quickly deploy new servers when you need them. To meet this need, you can create a virtual machine and run the operating system of your choice. . Since Exchange Server requires Windows PowerShell and Internet Information Services (IIS), you can also install these components. Exchange Server is not an application that can be installed in advance, but you can still copy the installed binaries to the virtual machine's hard drive so they are ready to install.

Once everything is in place, you can run Sysprep to remove anything that uniquely identifies the server, including GUIDs, computer names, IP addresses, and more. After the virtual server is "Sysprep", the virtual hard drive file can be turned into a template. This way, any template that needs to be deployed with a new Exchange server can run replication to virtual machines and new servers in a matter of minutes.

Now, you may want to know what this virtualization process has done. After all, Microsoft was the first to let us use Sysprep and clone server images a decade ago. The importance of virtualization is that it eliminates the need for hardware configuration. If you are deploying a new virtual server, you don't have to worry about whether the hardware abstraction layer of the template matches the server's hardware, or if the template contains all the necessary driver files. In addition, you can also build hardware configurations in the template. For example, if you know that your Exchange server should have 4 GB of memory, you can create a 4 GB memory allocation in an existing template.

As I mentioned earlier, there are many different real-time server configuration technologies, so it's no surprise that some third-party vendors are starting to take action. For example, Symantec's Veritas OpForce technology was developed specifically for real-time configuration. OpForce is designed to discover web servers, make an image for each server, and provide files for server configuration. This way, when a new server is needed, the mirroring and configuration information can be used to quickly create a server of the specified type (domain controller, DNS server, etc.).

In addition to the automated mirroring process, unlike other technologies, the OpForce I described can configure multiple servers at the same time. So if you have to configure 100 new servers, you only have to do it once to get the job done, saving a lot of time.