Long time no post, I know.
Been getting up to speed on the intricacies of SharePoint farms. Recently rebuilt my home office dev/test Win server, from 2003 R2 x64 to 2008 Enterprise x64; perhaps more details on that fun experience later. Installed SharePoint on 2008, installed SQL Server 2008 on 2008, but most interestingly, I've installed Hyper-V on 2008. Again, more posts to follow on this stuff.
Life onsite at NYS DOCS is your typical consulting scenario ... with a few twists. Inmate cleaning crews. Mandated TB testing. Metal detector for visitors and inmates. Correctional officers working front desk and other security points. You get used to it. Mostly.
Will be in Manhattan overnight on 12-19, returning noon 12-20; calendar's already full for that day and a half, but I think I'll be down again at least once in January.
Now that I've gone to Windows Server 2008, I'm hoping to use Hyper-V in place of XP, 2003, Vista, etc. VPCs for development and testing purposes, as well as live archives of stuff like my current Vista x64 notebook. It has a 120GB drive with 14 months worth of installations, uninstallations, reinstallations, service packs. I want to slap a fresh 200GB drive in here, but I don't want to lose access to the OS that was my primary working machine for over a year. Having ugpraded my fileserver to 1TB RAID5, I have room to drop a Hyper-V virtual machine of a stripped-down image of my notebook. Peace of mind for all those passwords and personal data you don't want to lose.
However, that server's workload has increased pretty significantly as of late. It's a white box Asus P5KC with a Q6600 2.4GHz quad core; 4GB of Corsair 1066 DDR2. With a BIOS upgrade, the motherboard can, according to Asus, support 45nm technology. If I can remove/replace the CPU, I'm looking at moving to an Intel Xeon X3370 Yorkfield 3.0GHz 1333FSB Quad-Core Server Processor. (Good thing I overdid it on the PSU I initially purchased, but still, with this CPU and the RAID5, I may need a bigger PSU as well.) I'd be moving to 8GB DDR3 1333 at the same time.
Cheaper than buying a new server ... but one of these days, I need to get around to investing in an HP or a Dell. Now might be the time -- this box would serve pretty well as a Linux server, but even maxed out, I'm not sure how well it will support my Hyper-V aspirations.
Final note, did anybody else catch the Oxite announcement from MSFT? I've been working toward rebuilding my various sites into an integrated landing page with lightweight CMS ... Oxite might be a better solution than homebrew after all ...
