Current Events > Fuck yeah, just completed a major project at work

(+) Yeah! (+)

My job has a huge network of about 400 locations, each site with its own individual network. We have a revolving door of network equipment that needs to be replaced due to lifecycle management. This year it was time to replace the core switches at 3 of our warehouses. 3 of us on the network team were assigned a location and tasked with replacing the core switches without taking the warehouse down.

I got the largest warehouse of the 3, and so much work went into just planning and preparing to do it. The business wants no outages through all this, so we had to get approved times to move switches to the new cores, move the routers, firewalls, and wireless LAN controllers all one at a time.

1. Connecting the new core switches to the old core switches.
2. Each access switch has two uplinks, one to each of the old switches. We had to move each link one at a time and make sure the config on each uplink was correct before connecting them to the new cores. This was about 40 switch stacks at the warehouse I was assigned.
3. Tonight was the last night of work. We moved the routers that get the site out to the internet as well as the company's private network, the wireless LAN controllers, and we moved the virtual interfaces and spanning tree root to the new core switches.

There was about a 10 minute outage tonight because I didn't have DHCP enabled on the new core switches, but I was able to get that fixed, fortunately. Feels good to have this done. I didn't even know this kind of thing was possible before I worked here.

Not bad at all. Moved the whole warehouse to the new core switches and only had a 10 minute outage the whole way.

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