Advice on moving a machine room to a new location?

Our company is moving to new offices in a couple of months, and I am responsible for looking after the move of the development servers in the company. most of the dev equipment is in 5, 42U cabinets + rack for switching/routing equipment. How do most people do this sort of thing? Move the cabinent whole or extract the indvidual components and move the racks empty.

any advise on prep and shutdown before the move would be welcome

Solution 1:

We have done a couple of moves with racks. Here's what I took away from the experience:

Before:

• label everything. Both ends. And the rack slot it's plugged into too.
• diagram everything.
• if you have important data, schedule a full backup to finish 6-12 hours before the move. At a minimum, validate the last full backup you have.
• plan to take everything out of the rack during the move. At a minimum take out half the mass, from the top down -- this means leave the top empty Don't expect movers to move a top-heavy rack. In a rack with a UPS at the base that means you are taking out probably 2/3 of the servers. Anything which is left racked MUST have rails and be secure in the rails (less than 0.5mm movement, and tolerant of any orientation -- including upside down and face down -- was our margin). We've moved full racks, and half-full racks, and the racks always need to be tilted/rotated, and it is downright scary to watch your livelyhood being dangled over a concrete loading dock.
• in our experience, front and rear doors are more decorative than load-bearing and leaving them on can make moving the racks very awkward because all the good hand-holding points are unavailable. Plan to remove the doors during the actual move. This forces the movers to lift, pull, push, and tug the rack by its strongest parts. Usually side panels can stay on, but be prepared to remove them if the movers think having them gone would help.
• hire someone with an insured truck to to the transportation. DO NOT do it yourself. You might think you are insured, but your insurance company will probably think otherwise. The second last thing you want is to be involved in a three-way blamestorm between your employer's insurance company and your insurance company.
• hire someone insured to physically pick up, move, put down, and (during an accident) drop your gear for you. DO NOT do it yourself. The last thing you want to do is hurt yourself or be involved in a co-worker's injury.
• make sure your insured someones specialize in high-tech moves and can supply blankets, anti-static bubble-wrap, and if necessary crates.

During the move:

• backups are good, right?
• do the wire disconnect yourself. Pull ALL wires that are disconnectable. Each wire should be labelled and go into a box that itself is well labelled.
• let the strong, well insured guys do the server extractions from the rack. Supervise the wrapping personally.
• stay out of the strong, well-insured guys' way when they do the loading and unloading.
• supervise the unwrapping and re-insertion into the racks. If there is ANY question about a server's condition, mention it, and note that it was mentioned.
• If the job is taking a while, have coffee and/or doughnuts available for the guys. If appropriate (and if they've done a good job), cold beer for after the job goes well too.

Physical bring-up:

• double your time estimate for getting things back on track.
• have a build-up plan. A good build up plan includes a checklist of all services, servers, and a test plan.
• validate, validate, validate.
• check any servers which may have been damaged in transit as noted above.
• don't let management cheap out when it comes to food if you are working through meal times. Hungry techs make mistakes. If the bring-up is going to be long and complicated, schedule time to get out of the room for 90 minutes to go get a real meal.

After:

• a cold beer for you may be appropriate, too.

Solution 2:

I'm with Kevin on unracking and disconnecting. Racks that I've worked with that are built to ship loaded typically have additional bracing and must be attached to a fixed base (like a pallet) during shipping. Usually the servers have some kind of locking mechanism, too. If you're not moving something that isn't built to be moved loaded don't.

I would add this to Kevin's answer:

Part of documenting is knowing why the various connections and cables are there. You can make all the notes, take all the pictures, etc, that you want to, but at the end of the day if you don't understand why something is there you're running a risk of not knowing what to test to establish, after the move, that you "got everything".

This is a golden opportunity to, as you're documenting the "what's plugged into what" of the move, ask yourself "why is this plugged into this"?

I've had too many cases of the "I'll just patch this here and temporarily change a VLAN assignment" that turns into a semi-permanent configuration that no one documented come back to bite me when moving equipment years later.

Before any equiment goes into a personal vehicle, find out how the company's insurance is handling claims in the event of damage during transport.

Back everything up before you begin moving. Assume that all the equipment will be destroyed during the move because (if you're driving on public roads, at least) it could be. It goes w/o saying that the backup media should not move with the infrastructure gear!

Solution 3:

Extract the individual components and move the racks empty. This also has the advantage of allowing you to reconnect things in an optimal configuration and get your wiring exactly the way you want it. Just be sure to document everything before, during and after. Take digital pictures to help.