Exercises
1. What servers are used in your environment? How many different vendors are used? Do you consider this to be a lot of vendors? What would be the benefits and problems with increasing the number of vendors? Decreasing?
2. Describe your site’s strategy in purchasing maintenance and repair contracts. How could it be improved to be cheaper? How could it be improved to provide better service?
3. What are the major and minor differences between the hosts you install for servers versus clients’ workstations?
4. Why would one want hot-swap parts on a system without n + 1 redundancy?
5. Why would one want n + 1 redundancy if the system does not have hot- swap parts?
6. Which critical hosts in your environment do not have n + 1 redundancy or cannot hot-swap parts? Estimate the cost to upgrade the most critical hosts to n + 1.
7. An SA who needed to add a disk to a server that was low on disk space chose to wait until the next maintenance period to install the disk rather than do it while the system was running. Why might this be?
8. What services in your environment would be good candidates for replac- ing with an appliance (whether or not such an appliance is available)? Why are they good candidates?
9. What server appliances are in your environment? What engineering would you have to do if you had instead purchased a general-purpose machine to do the same function?