Hello from the Chicago-land area!
For those that are keeping up with me outside of this blog, you’ll know that I have accepted a contract with, well, a major Insurance company… to help facilitate both a move to Windows 7 and XenDesktop for about 18,000 users.
I’ve transitioned my work with TechSmart to be a consultant only, so I’ll continue working on projects for them but only in the evenings or as I have time elsewhere, like weekends. As you’ll see soon, I’ll have plenty of that time available…
I’ll be working from the Downers Grove area, which I must say is much more palatable than Chicago itself- their main building is a massive skyscraper overlooking the Lake- I just wasn’t ready for that. The office in Downers Grove is a much more approachable 6 floor building.
Though it does in fact pain me to be back into the cubicle world after my 10 year absence, I am working with a team of about 7, two of which with direct XenDesktop experience. In other words, gone will be the days of me being the only person knowledgeable about how things run. Now, there will be defined standards we all agree upon. It’ll be great to be working with this team, we seem to be getting along quite well and the project only has me slightly terrified, which is good 
Als0 fortunate is that they have an existing environment supporting just under 1000 VDI employees, almost all of which are working from home. That means as far as the XenDesktop part of this is concerned, we’re mostly just supporting an increasing scale.
The big challenge for us will be that the environment currently uses Novell for it’s primary authentication and overall environment, which poses a very large challenge for Windows 7, which currently does not have a good workaround. The overall goal is to transition away from Novell to the more up-t0-date Active Directory world, but based on what I’ve seen thus far the task is more than a little daunting.
So that is the quick summary of what my life is going to be like at work, at least for the next few months.
This contract is only secured until the end of the year currently, which is why, as the subject line suggested, I am living out of hotel rooms!
My wife and I decided it would be best to leave her in Fort Collins while I make sure the contract here is extended for at least one year. So, using my advanced Dave Ramsey negotiating skills, I managed to talk a manager of the Extended Stay in Downers Grove to a rate very similar to a 1 room apartment lease in town. This way I can write off my stay as a travel expense rather than a living expense, which is handy as well. The room isn’t the greatest, of course, but at least I’ll have a fridge that doesn’t freeze everything in it, even when it’s off…
Now to tell a story, just because I can’t resist.
One of the hard decisions with this contract and the duration of the stay was deciding whether or not to bring my home PC, affectionately (and appropriately) called the “Green Monster”. The machine lives up to it’s name with running an overclocked i7, 12GB RAM, 2 SAS 15k drives, 2 SATA drives, etc, etc, etc… It’s not a lightweight. For the first week here in the area, I had booked a hotel with Priceline for a week. The room was horrible, but at $30/night I didn’t feel like complaining even though the heat didn’t work and the small fridge froze everything inside, even at the lowest setting of ‘off’. Knowing I was trying to (and did) find a better deal, it didn’t seem to matter.
One benefit of the hotel was that it’s broadband speed was excellent. I was able to update my Mozy Backup at 10 Mbit/s which is fantastic. I left the PC running in my room for 4 days straight. But now the rookie mistake.
I was transporting the PC using suitcases. Backbreaking, but not as clumsy as carrying it manually.
What I didn’t think of was letting the PC sit and cool before putting it in the bag. Stupid, rookie mistake. Laptops may be built to handle this kind of abuse but needless to say, SAS drives (meant for enterprise servers) are not.
So upon setting up my computer last night, I realized my mistake when Windows failed to load. One of the SAS drives holding my boot partition had tanked, and of course recovery is going to be more hassle than it’s worth.
For the over-interested techie, I’m very strongly considering a move to PCI-e SSD drives for my boot part, namely the REVODRIVE series. With sustained writes over 400 MB/sec it goes beyond what SAS is even capable of, even in RAID 0. I’ll continue to use my SAS array as a temporary write cache for video editing and perhaps as an install directory for games and such, obviously it can no longer be trusted
Now the huge bummer about all of this is twofold. One, I had run out of space on my backup drive so I have backed up data only- not a system restore. So, even though Windows 7 has a very easy restore process, I’m looking at a reinstall no matter what. But two is that my disk is… at home. So, I have to decide if it’s time to buy another copy and upgrade my Wife’s PC when I return home, or have her send me the disks… hard to say.
Anyway, that’s what’s going on in my life. Thanks for reading!
-DJ
