Data Center Operations
VCU Technology Services will be performing scheduled maintenance beginning on Wednesday, August 14, 2024 starting at 7:00am to migrate virtual server instances to the University's new data center facility.
During this time, server instances residing on private cloud platforms supported and maintained by VCU Technology Services will be non-disruptively live migrated from the existing physical data center to our new location.
While no impact to services is anticipated in association with this work, in the event of unexpected issues affecting service availability, updates will be posted here.
This will be an ongoing effort involving the migration of many hundreds of servers, with work projected to conclude by Friday, November 8, 2024 at 5:00pm.
Please contact the IT Support Center with any questions or concerns at 804-828-2227 or itsc@vcu.edu.
VCU Technology Services will be applying routine patches and maintenance to the University's primary Network Attached Storage (NAS) cluster beginning on Saturday, August 10, 2024 starting at 10:00am.
This work is expected to be non-disruptive, and no impact to services is anticipated.
In the event of unexpected issues affecting service availability, updates will be posted here.
Please contact the IT Support Center with any questions or concerns at 804-828-2227 or itsc@vcu.edu.
Scheduled maintenance for the University's primary Network Attached Storage (NAS) cluster is complete.
Please contact the IT Support Center with any questions or concerns at 804-828-2227 or itsc@vcu.edu.
The ISP for the Universities backup internet connected has experienced a service outage due to a commercial power outage. Current estimates of power restoration are for July 21st. The Universities primary internet connection is up and operational. There has been no disruption to the Universities internet services.
VCU Technology Services will be performing a failover test of file sharing services hosted on the University's primary NAS cluster. This work is scheduled to begin at 8pm on Friday, June 21st.
Work is expected to conclude by 11:59pm on Sunday, June 23rd, at which point, the majority of the University's file services are expected to have been failed over to the DR cluster at our backup site, where they will remain for one week.
On Friday, June 28th, beginning at 8pm, failback operations will commence to return all file services to the primary NAS cluster. This effort is expected to conclude by 11:59pm on Sunday, June 30th.
Users experiencing any issues accessing file shares are encouraged to first shutdown and reboot their machines and retry prior to opening a support ticket.
In addition to file shares, the following services will experience brief disruptions during the failover (June 21-23) and failback (June 28-30) operations.
- VCU Filelocker (https://filelocker.vcu.edu)
- Personal websites residing on people.vcu.edu
Further details have been proactively communicated to the University's Technology Users Group and the VCU Technology Advisory Committee.
VCU Technology Services has completed work associated with Phase 1 of the primary Network Attached Storage (NAS) failover test. The majority of the University's file services are now operating from our standby environment at our backup site, where they will remain for one week.
On Friday, June 28th, beginning at 8pm, failback operations will commence to return all file services to the primary Network Attached Storage (NAS) environment at our primary location. This effort is expected to conclude by 11:59pm on Sunday, June 30th.
Meanwhile, users experiencing any issues accessing file shares are encouraged to please first shutdown and reboot their machines and retry prior to opening a support ticket.
Please contact the IT Support Center with any questions or concerns at 804-828-2227 or itsc@vcu.edu.
Beginning at 8pm this evening (Friday, June 28th), VCU Technology Services will commence failback operations to return file sharing services to the primary Network Attached Storage (NAS) environment at our primary data center. This effort is expected to conclude by 11:59pm on Sunday, June 30th.
Users experiencing any issues accessing file shares are encouraged to first shutdown and reboot their machines and retry prior to opening a support ticket.
In addition to file shares, the following services will experience brief disruptions during this work.
- VCU Filelocker (https://filelocker.vcu.edu)
- Personal websites residing on people.vcu.edu
Please contact the IT Support Center with any questions or concerns at 804-828-2227 or itsc@vcu.edu.
ImageNow is currently unavailable. Staff is researching the cause and troubleshooting and trying to resolve.
Please contact the IT Support Center with any questions or concerns at 804-828-2227 or itsc@vcu.edu.
ImageNow is up and operational. Issues has been resolved.
On Thursday April 11th starting at 5pm, Fiber maintenance will occur to prepare for the move of our MARIA 100Gbs link from Pocahontas to the new data center at TOC. There are redundant paths to the internet, Internet 2, and other off campus resources, however a momentary delay while circuits switch to the redundant path is possible.
The fiber maintenance was successfully completed.
Starting at 4pm on Tuesday March 12, our fiber contractor will be pulling a new 288 fiber cable to support the new TOC data center. There should not be any impact to other fibers in the area.
The data center teams are currently aware of an outage affecting access to storage resources residing on our central network attached storage cluster. The outage is affecting the performance and availability of numerous systems and applications that rely on these storage resources. Staff are fully engaged with vendor support and working to restore these services as quickly as possible.
The data center teams are continuing to work on an outage affecting access to storage resources residing on our central network attached storage cluster. The outage is affecting the performance and availability of numerous systems and applications that rely on these storage resources. Staff are fully engaged with vendor support and working to restore these services as quickly as possible.
While some resources have been restored, we are continuing to troubleshoot issues with website access.
During this time, in order to access Canvas, rather than using the URL go.vcu.edu/canvas, please use canvas.vcu.edu.
In order to access eServices, rather than using go.vcu.edu/eservices, please use ssb.vcu.edu.
Mission critical resources have been restored including web resources accessible via go.vcu.edu.
Limited systems, such as VCU Filelocker, remain impacted but will be back online by close of business tomorrow (Monday, February 12th).
According to our records, all storage volumes that were taken offline as a result of the outage have been restored and confirmed accessible to the systems that require them. If any issues are detected moving forward, usual procedures should be followed for requesting troubleshooting / support.
On Friday 2/2/24 from 5 AM - 6 AM, users will exprience a short internet outages while we perform critical troubleshooting of the 100Gig Internet connection from VCU. The outages will occur for approximately 3-5 mins and there will be 2-3 of those in that hour. We expect to main our internet connection during this change via the secondary internet connection out of Harris Hall data center.
All work was completed on 2/2/2024 as expected.
Network Services contractor will be onsite to fix damaged fibers between Cabell Library and TAB on Thursday December 28th. During the repair the following PCI networks may be unavailable:
TAB
Henry St Parking Deck West
Henry St Parking Deck East
ICA
Laurel St Parking Deck
Rhoads Hall
West Grace Student Housing
West Grace Student Housing North
700 W. Grace St - Facilities Management Building
Au Bon Pan - 944 W. Grace St
Broad and Belvedere Apartments
814 W. Grace St - Formerly Noodles and Company
West Broad Parking Deck
Work is expected to be completed around 7pm.
The Cabell to TAB fiber repair was successfully completed.