I LOVE being a Domino Administrator
Mat Newman November 25 2010 20:54:50
Being a Domino Admin is simple ... but it's not easy.A Domino Admin's role is to ensure communication and participation within the Domain.
That's the simple part.
Now the corollary, it isn't easy being a Domino Admin, but mostly it is simple. Take what I've been doing for the past couple of days:
- Upgrade 3 servers to Domino 8.5.2,
- Upgrade the SameTime server to 8.5.1,
- Implement Transaction Logging on all,
- Implement DAOS on all,
- Move Lotus Protector to the ESX,
- Implement a new ID Vault (tip – move your Vault from your old server BEFORE you decommission it),
- Resolve 5137 DDM reports,
- Change the Domain's mail routing and replication topology,
- Roll out 8.5.2 clients via Smart-Upgrade to the users,
- Roll new policy features available in 8.5.2 (YAY – MANAGED REPLICA'S!!!),
- Recover 110 Gigabytes of disk-space on each of the Domino Cluster Server members that host mail
OK – the last one wasn't me, that was DAOS. By-the-way, did I mention DAOS ROCKS!
DUE TO DOMINO CLUSTERING THE USERS DID NOT NOTICE ANY SERVER BEING DOWN, NOT ONCE, PERIOD.
If you are a Domino Admin and haven't upgraded your servers to 8.5.1 FP3 + then you need to covertly ignore your IT manager, bypass your Financial Requisition system and take advantage of the '90 day trial' feature from http://www.lotus.com/downloads. Argue with your CIO/CTO/CEO later … after you've shown them how moving forward you can give your organisation REAL ROI (Return On Investment) that the more recent versions of Domino server can bring to your organisation ... yes, I grew up in the country (can you tell?), we may not do things by the book, but our results speak for themselves.
DAOS will save you disk-space, Transaction Logging will improve server performance, SameTime's latest version and ODS 51 is “smaller, faster and more manoeuvrable” (Top-Gun quote, sorry!)
Throw in Design Compression, Data compression, and all of a sudden you have no-shit real disk savings!
BONUS ANSWER REGIS: DOMINO DATA STORAGE REDUCED BY 50%
I admit – YOU might not gain the same level of savings - but hey, my experience with DAOS hasn't yet resulted in anything less than 30% (BTW - have I ever mentioned that the SEND method of work-flow IS NOT REAL Collaboration - despite what certain other vendors will have you believe!).
And TRUST me on this one, if you don't touch the design of your mail databases, you can get all of these benefits, even if your USERS are still on Notes 5!!! (shame on you if they are!)
(Yes - it's YOU I'm talking about, and yes; your new dual quad-core with 8GB of memory and 2TB of disk-space is more than enough to handle Domino 8.5.2, AND you'll get 25%+ of your existing disk-space back!!!)
Being a Domino Admin is simple, but you need to do the hard yards to ensure that other's believe it's anything other than easy!
At this point I could wax lyrical about how difficult it would be to achieve what has been done in the last 2 days using another vendor's 'equivalent' product-line. You and I know I don't even need to bother.
Now it's time to take off the Domino Admin hat and become a Developer for the next 3 weeks so that I may bask in the adulation that results from a functional and intuitive user experience, yes - all Developers know that feeling!
I DO love being a Domino Admin!