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The original was posted on /r/sysadmin by /u/Alzzary on 2024-01-24 11:13:27+00:00.

I just had the most productive meeting in my life today.

I am the sole sysadmin for a ~110 users law firm and basically manage everything.

We have almost everything on-prem and I manage our 3 nodes vSphere cluster and our roughly 45 VMs.

This includes updating and rebooting on a monthly basis. During that maintenance window, I am regularly forced to shut down some critical services. As you can guess, lawers aren’t that happy about it because most of them work 12 hours a day, that includes my 7pm to 22pm maintenance window one tuesday a month.

My boss, who is the CFO, asked me if it was possible to reduce the amount of maintenance I’m doing without overlooking security patching and basic maintenance. I said it’s possible, but we’d need to clusterize parts of our infrastructure, including our ~7TB file, exchange and SQL/APP servers and that’s not cheap. His answer ?

“There are about 20 lawers who can’t work for 3 hours once a month, that’s about a 10k to 15k loss. Come with a budget and I’ll defend it”.

I love this place.