I have been asked to create full documentation for a system that I handle.
We have about 75 Servers providing apps to customers. 4 routers, 4 Firewalls,
All SUN running Solaris 10.
We use many different technologies, such as SUN Clusters, Load Balancers, SUN Logical Domains, Routers, NAT, Firewalls, DNS, MySQL, Postgres, SUN Glassfish, about 10 proprietary applications, etc etc. (Im not ordering the list with any logic, apologies)
We run the store with only three people, we overlap in functions, so we all know what the other does.
The company has a big development team, but IT is very small, so, Development give us the software and the Scripts to create the DB, together with some documentation,, IT (us) must install, test, execute load test, deploy and maintain the whole show. IT (us) planned the infrastructure in a way that has the minimum downtime during operation, maximizing the usage of the equipment.
After some time of planning, we came up with virtualization, SAN arrays, dual cards, dual circuits, collocation facilities, etc etc, So, our system can be upgrade inline, part of it can be taken offline while we do maintenance work on other parts, etc etc. No that we have any formal training in High Availability, but so far, we can literally unplug half of the electric circuit, hence shutting down half of the system and the downtime during failover and convergence is about 20 seconds. The system is a little over dimensioned, since we can run with half of it and still being over the degraded mode threshold.
Well, this is the problem,, everybody like the way it works, but the reasoning and the planning and all the execution is on the head of my three guys and myself, so, Management wants me to put everything on paper.
I dont know where to start, I dont know if there any standard for those kind of documents.
I dont know to which extend I must document (since I have information to fill a book).
Is there any place I can find similar documentation? following like a pattern or a framework.
I dont even know how to name the documents :-) .
As you can notice, we were not prepared to do this job, but we were asked for and we did, in a very empirical way, following manuals, documents online, asking questions, taking the advise for the manufacturer, etc.
Now we must document.
I hope some people can give us a hand on starting.
Thanks
MM.
