The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition

Chapter 20. Maintenance Windows

If you found out you had to power off an entire data center, do a lot of maintenance, then bring it all back up, would you know how to manage the event? Some companies are lucky enough to be able to do this every quarter or once a year. SAs delay tasks that require interruption of service, such as hardware upgrades, parts replacement, or network changes, until this window. Sometimes a weekly timeslot is allocated for major and risky changes to consolidate downtime to a specific time when customers will be least affected. Other times we are forced to do this because of physical maintenance such as construction, power or cooling upgrades, or office moves. Other times we need to do this for emergency reasons, such ...