Work / Professional services
Replacing a 9-year-old server without losing a billable day
A 22-person accounting firm was running its practice software, file shares and domain on a single 2017 server with backups that had never been restored. Tax season was eleven weeks away.
Representative engagement. Details from more than one client are combined and identifying specifics changed; the technical approach and outcomes are as delivered.
The situation
The server was out of warranty, the RAID controller had logged a predictive failure, and the nightly backup job reported success to a USB drive that turned out to contain three months of corrupted files. The firm's practice-management vendor required Windows Server, the partners wanted to avoid a wholesale move to the cloud mid-season, and the network was a single flat subnet shared with guest Wi-Fi.
What we did
We proposed a Proxmox VE host with redundant storage, running the Windows Server workloads as VMs alongside a Linux file server, with the old machine kept powered as a fallback for 30 days. Backups went to a local appliance with immutable snapshots and nightly off-site replication; the first thing we did after the build was restore the practice database to a test VM in front of the managing partner.
The network was split into staff, server, guest and printer VLANs behind a new firewall, with remote access moved from an exposed RDP port to a VPN with MFA. The cut-over ran on a Friday evening: data synced during the week, final delta copied after close of business, services pointed at the new host, and every workstation tested before Saturday noon.
Backup & recovery
Cybersecurity
Managed IT (Core)
Where it stands now
The firm moved onto a Core managed plan after the project. Monthly reports include the test-restore result; the old server was decommissioned after 30 days and its drives destroyed with a certificate. Two years on, the same host carries an additional document-management VM added without new hardware.
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