I'm in the process of setting up our Hong Kong (HK) office. We've installed an MPLS line there over 6 months ago. Our plan was to send someone over from NY to install everything and set them up. Then the economy tanked and personnel got laid off. As a result the HK office has been using our Juniper SSL VPN exclusively. They are able to grab files, access email, intranet and work like any remote office. But the MPLS line is just sitting there costing us per month.
I've finally been able to think about them and wanted to get that ball rolling in getting them setup to work exactly like our Shanghai office is. Meaning getting connected to the MPLS. My counterpart in London and another Admin didn't like the idea I presented of remotely setting them up. They'd rather send someone over and train them how to do things differently. My take is that we've been waiting on someone going over for over 6 months and we are paying of a line we are not using. In that time we could have had them setup remotely using local resources when needed. I've met with my boss and fleshed out a plan to get our local consultants involved. It's not a difficult thing to do at all. We've already had a server ordered and delivered sitting there as well for over 6 months that wasn't being used (reasons explained later).
I've drafted my plan and sent it to my boss and we got on a conference call with the HK folks one night EST. We all agreed to attempt to get this to happen. The HK folks wanted direct connection to our NY office and I wanted to give it to them. I've sent my plan over to the local consultants. My plan was to get them to install VMware on the server setup it up according to my instruction I sent over with IP addresses etc, connect the ESX server to a switch that connects to the MPLS router and I'll take it from there. At first they didn't know how to install VMware. So I sent them this youtube VMWare ESX 3 Training CBT - Installing ESX and a link to site How to Install VMware ESX Server. I also stated in an email to them that if they know how to install any *NIX distro they should be able to install ESX with no problem. Once they got that email with links they said yeah they know how to do it.
So now the server is installed and connected to the MPLS. I got an email from the office manager saying that it was done one morning followed by an email from the person in charge there (above office manager) and you would not believe this. The person in charge said the server was too loud and decided to turn it off. Granted the HK office is one room in a business center and the server is in the corner. So I've asked if they could leave the server on when they leave and turn it off in the morning. There night is our day and vise-versa. So they did that for me the next day. I was able to access the server via infrastructure client and SSL. I sent over our windows image, took about 30 mins. Once that was done I installed the first VM and that is a Windows DC for that office. The second VM installed was a file server. There were some pain points with the installation. I remote desktop to our Virtual center server which has all my VMware tools then I vnc into the VM's once they were up and that was a bit slow since I didn't get VMware tool installed yet. Once the tools were installed I was good to go. That took pretty much my entire day.
I come in the next day and the server is off. Yes off they couldn't even turn it back on when they left the office. Either they forgot or don't care. So that's where that project is right now. They can't stand the noise and even if I did put the finishing touches on it they would have turning it off anyway. Now imagine if we sent someone over like everyone wanted to do. That would have been thousand of $ in travel expenses and once they left the machine would be turned off O_o!
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