SA Summit Mid-Year 2014

Every six months I hold a sysadmin team meeting I call an SA Summit. These half-day meetings are meant to get everyone on the same page and get us excited for the work ahead. To me, the technical discussions and the trainings are the most valuable. The team is great about sharing ideas. Participation is never a problem as everyone willingly contributes comments and suggestions. Each person also provides brief training to the rest of the team covering some area where they have expertise / experience.

Here is the agenda from the August 2014 meeting:

Purpose
To recognize our accomplishments.
To review the current state of systems and the server environment.
To review team goals and adjust/add goals.
To hold technical discussions and team training. 

Accomplishments
< accomplishments list >

Goals
< goals list >

State of the Systems
Slides
   - number of physical hosts and virtual machines (VMs)
   - number of physical hosts of each model of hardware
   - number of VMs in various environments
   - growth chart of VMs over the past five years
   - image of the landscape of blade chassis
   - image of the landscape of SAN disk units and switches

Technical Discussions
- Shared storage across blades
- Disaster recovery and business continuity status, testing and plans
- Monitoring script to monitor NFS mounts
- Cloud environment status and plans
- VMware environment status and plans
- Automation status and plans

Training
- DNS architecture and future plans
- Method for refreshing test environments

- VMware vCOPs 

- EMC cloning and snapshots