I have recently taken over a mediumish-sized network (largest I've worked on) and am in the process of completely rebuilding it from scratch.
I have about 100k in equipment that is brand new but due to the ineptness of the previous administrator, my company was called in and I was put in charge. When I started the state of the network was abysmal and I am still trying to figure out exactly how everything stayed up.
I have 3 very powerful XenServers (8 xeon-5 procs, 256gb mem, 1t RAID10 SSD), 6 10gig switches, best sonicwall on the market, full technical support of EVERYTHING. It is basically a wet dream and if I do this right my career is going in very good directions (talking CIO of a multi million dollar company here...).
I am making good headway so far, albeit my experience has been limited to smaller networks up until this point. I hold a master's in IT and tons of certifications in a wide range of technologies.
Right now the situation is too complicated to reintroduce my team (I have a tech and help desk who will take care of smaller issues). I have built a VDI environment (50x 8.1 Ent), brought up all my servers (every component is on a different VM using 2012 R2 Datacenter), and am working on building a user portal through sharepoint and getting Lync to work with the VDI. Countless sleepless nights, but I'm proud so far.
What I want to do is get some background Linux stuff running for monitoring the network and doing infiltration testing. I have taking ethical hacking classes in the past but this was years ago. Plus I feel linux could actually show me a lot more about whats going on in the network before we bring in someone to start rewiring.
I really want this job and really need to impress the owner and the developer. The developer has a weak spot for linux and if I could get some linux servers up I can also reduce overall costs (sonicwall, openmanage, and idrac are quite expensive).
So what are some good linux distrus or servers that I could start introducing? I realize XenServer, XekDesktop, and SonicWALL all run on linux but that is not obvious to the people in charge - especially because they are ran through web prompts under Windows...
Oh yea and any other advice is appreciated :). This job is probably beyond my capabilities but I am sitting here every single night watching cert vids and playing in my test environment for things i can try. I want this network rock solid with no downtime and impossible to penetrate.
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