Whilst you are faced with a multitude of issues, don't get lost in the weeds by details when you are trying to untangle the past to move it forward.
A simple spreadsheet to track hardware, licenses and other details like location, specs and primary contact is a perfectly reasonable starting point.
I say that because you don't know what you don't know yet. You might for example discover that some shops are doing their own thing, regardless of company policy.
Creating a ticketing system is useful to track stuff for everyone. I settled on trax with web access to people who need it, but the computer literacy levels might prevent some from using this.
Burnout is a very distinct possibility in an environment like this, so make sure that you set aside time for you to think. Call it a meeting, call it an on-site visit, whatever you do, take time to think.
Also, remember to backup your work. It's not unheard of for it to vanish unexpectedly if you are perceived as a threat.
Source, I've been working in this profession for 40 years.
I’m not in tech anymore but must comment that I work at a major company in a dynamic field with young, ultra-qualified, ultra-smart personnel that is not horribly computer-unsavvy but I still think I’m the only one in the whole company who opens IT support tickets via a system instead of caling, even though IT pushes the system and even though you get good support via the system and horrible people by calling
The ticket system is for the IT department, allowing it to track activities, keep abreast of open tickets, build a knowledge base and share information with colleagues.
Users benefit from this indirectly.
Of course, some managers use ticket systems to manage performance metrics. That doesn't work, but they'll never learn.
I love it. More stable than many things. Preseeds for PXE.
I don't have to fuss on my fun systems.
Work systems are different. Works great when it is a nice fit. Use mostly RHEL family there, and dislike the rolling upgrades. (Breaking changes between "minor" version changes. Rarely an issue on Debian.)
I have filtering, but those all happen after the mail is in the Inbox. I get a quarter second of crazy emails and previews and things moving, then they are gone. (Outlook sucks.)
Outlook has "rules" you can configure to route incoming mail into different folders and mark as read (if you have access to their web client, configure the rules there so they run even when the desktop client is closed).
I know Google's web interface has similar features. If it's not built into Thunderbird then I'd be shocked if there wasn't an extension for it.
Hyperv has shit automation support and doesn't provide native apis to work with. You need vmm or some third layer to talk to. That's where the shit starts
The problem is what happens if they pull a VMware. They could just bump up licensing costs so that you end up spending the same as you would to be in the cloud
We recently decided to move away from VMware after the Broadcom "takeover". We have three scenarios to cover; datacenter setup, satellite offices (stand alone hosts) & hosting partners.
For stand alone it was an easy choice; proxmox.
For datacenter; hyper-v.
Hosting providers; VMware (their choice).
At moment we are pushing our hosting providers for exit plans from VMware.
As a company we have taken the decision to not support Broadcom pricing structure if we can avoid it.
Large companies telling broadcom to go suck a lemon, is definitely what can make a difference for the rest of us in the future... Definitely maybe, possibly make potential a difference.
I may only use VMware workstation pro for desktop virtualization for lab use, and I do realize the ramifications for enterprise operations are exponentially greater. But even I am getting a worse service. I used to be able to google an issue, find a link to the VMware forum and just open that. Now *.vmware.com redirects to broadcom.com and searching for the post there seldom finds it again. Absolutely brilliant timing for google to kill cached pages.
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