In attendance: William Dougherty-NI&S, chair and scribe; Richard Quintin-DBAA; Karen Herrington-IMS; Susan Brooker-Gross-IT Mgmt; Bill deWindt-LT; Flex Vaughn-UCS/VTOC; Kimberley Homer-SETI; Mike Moyer-Data Center Manager; Brian Jones-CNS/SS; Kevin Davis-UCS
Power outage in Cassell on April 22, 2012 from 6pm-6am.
LT has the following activities scheduled which will impact the University community:
Saturday May 12, 2012
- Scholar will be upgraded to Sakai version 2.8 (previously discussed at SAMS meetings)
- Legacy Course Evaluation (courseeval.cc.vt.edu) will be shutdown as the new SPOT system has replaced it for production purposes.
Week of May 19th, DB upgrade will also be preformed but will take place during normal maintenance period.
CNS:
MDS (fiber channel switches related to centralized storage) upgrades that will affect storage will occur the last week of April or first of May. Final date has not yet been set.
Internet link (both 10Gbps border links to the commodity Internet) will be down for reconfiguration to further the UC project the last week of April. Duration should be short. Final date has not yet been set.
Rolling building distribution interruptions for UC configuration will be occurring over the next six months or so.
All of these network interruptions will be announced ahead of time on VT-DNET.
UCS/IMS:
Changes related to Google services. April 15th, 2012 will be the date where alumni conversion processes will be curtailed temporarily. So last May's graduates will not be moved until full transition of all users occur. In future, all accounts will already be on Google so there will be no need to move these accounts, even if they gain employment at VT. Nothing on the IT Critical Dates calendar yet, but belief is that a Middleware deployment is necessary in order for this to happen.
May 1st, 2012 is date that Google will no longer be CASified and all current users will be notified via e-mail to make a change through My VT. Still use PID, but cannot use same password.Will post the notice on the Google start page as well to hopefully preclude belief that phishing is occurring.
June 3rd, 2012 is tentative date for allowing voluntary conversion of current VT-Mail users to new Google Apps for VT.
October 1st, 2012 is tentative date for forced conversion of all users.
DCM:
Project scheduled to replace System X. As of June 1st, 2012 System X will be decommissioned. Work will be required to move cooling units and other infrastructure elements will be moved and/or installed.
A new generator to accommodate the new "C" power feed will be delivered sometime mid to late May.
"Normal maintenance windows" suggested verbiage (edited during the meeting):
Information to publish to our general community (on www.computing.vt.edu; on other service-specific sites as desired)
Information Technology strives to provide online services 24 hours daily, year-round. There are times, however, when services must be temporarily interrupted in order to fix problems or to install security and function-related updates. These updates are themselves intended to ensure ongoing, consistent service availability.
Generally, the lowest usage for services is from 4 am to 7 am. To the extent possible, planned downtime to fix or install updates will occur during this time.
Occasional extended downtimes will be accommodated during non-peak periods, e.g., session breaks, over weekends. Such events will announced well in advance to the user community.
For any questions you may have about whether your inability to access a service is due to a planned or unplanned outage, please see IT STATUS Page on computing.vt.edu or call 4Help (etc.).
Obligations of Information Technology service managers:
1. Enter planned downtimes on the Critical Dates (or its successor) calendar.
2. When planned downtime of enterprise services is expected to extend beyond the 4am to 7am window, communicate at least 5 working days in advance through all of the following methods:
· Campus news
· IT Status page on www.computing.vt.edu
· Where appropriate and available, service-specific website or email list
3. To the extent possible, include a “the service is down” landing page for a service that is, indeed, down!
Enterprise services include Banner/Hokie Spa, My VT, Web Hosting, email, Scholar, and network services (voice and data) not localized to a specific building or part of campus. Enterprise services also includes systems that will prevent other services from being used (e.g., CAS, the Enterprise directory, etc.)