Migrating Exchange 2010 to Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment A Dell Technical White Paper Global Solutions Engineering Team Feedback: solutionfeedback@dell.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. © 2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this material in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Dell Inc. is strictly forbidden. For more information, contact Dell.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................. 4 Audience and Scope .................................................................................................... 4 Hardware Summary..................................................................................................... 5 Dell AIM and Its Components ...............................
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Boot-up Persona and Install Agent .............................................................................. 22 Install Exchange Server ........................................................................................... 22 Create databases and users ...................................................................................... 22 Advantages of AIM and Exchange 2010 DAG being used together ........................
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Figure 12. RPC requests ........................................................................................... 26 Figure 13. RPC latencies .......................................................................................... 26 Figure 14. Queue length - mailbox .............................................................................. 27 Figure 15. Queue length – hub transport ..................................
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Introduction Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) is datacenter software that manages an environment so that workloads can be isolated from the underlying hardware. AIM changes the traditional way in which elements of the datacenter are managed: it controls the logical networks and the server boot environment. Using AIM, you can create a pool of backup servers that are ready to step in and do the work of any failed server.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Hardware Summary This section provides an overview of the hardware used to study Exchange 2010 with AIM. Table 1.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Using AIM, CLI commands are applied to the database immediately upon submitting the configuration changes. The Controller maintains a database of the resources identified in the Dell AIM environment. When users connect to the Controller by using the Console or the CLI, the Controller projects to the Console or CLI a copy of the most current database to monitor and change.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment system and the agent will configure all the networking settings required by the persona‘s network connections directly on the existing network interfaces. The concept of NIC failover does not apply to access mode since usually a single channel is assigned to each NIC. In certain scenarios, a persona may be migrated from a physical server to a virtual server (virtual machine) or vice versa.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment case of failure to access an active copy of a database, one of the passive copies of the database is activated to provide availability. AIM‘s high availability complements Exchange DAG. As an example scenario, consider an infrastructure which already has two Exchange 2010 mailbox servers that are in a Database Availability Group (DAG). If one of these servers fails, the other active server can mount those database copies.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Availability Group (DAG). The DAG is an Exchange 2010-specific feature that allows clustering of mailbox servers. Figure 1 shows the logical view of the Exchange 2010 solution described in Table 2, without an AIM environment. Two active directories can be used to provide immunity towards failure of one of the domain controllers. Note that in the lab exercise, one machine was used for the domain controller. Figure 1.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Table 3. AIM-specific components AIM Configuration AIM Controller Standby Server Storage hardware for Persona Figure 2.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Deploying Exchange with AIM - A Brownfield scenario This section describes setting up Exchange with AIM environment in a Brownfield scenario. A Brownfield scenario assumes that an Exchange ecosystem already exists, and an AIM environment needs to be integrated in a cooperative manner to the existing Exchange ecosystem.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment an AIM environment, servers mapped to personas will be power-cycled typically during failover and retarget scenarios. Apart from the modular chassis switches, two top-of-the-rack PowerConnect 6248 switches are used in the deployment configuration to perform routing between VLANs and are a redundant pair. The top-ofthe-rack switches are not managed by AIM.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment The blade chassis has a total of six fabrics that can be used for 1 Gbps Ethernet networking and a redundant pair of Chassis Management Controllers (CMC). The first fabric (A1) was used for the MAPI network. The Domain Controller resides on this network. The second fabric (A2), is used for replication of logs from active database copies to passive database copies.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Installing AIM Software Gather the following information before beginning the installation of your controller software: 1. Controller IP address—this is the IP address that is used to access the Controller from the web browser or CLI editor. It is not the IP address of the network interface. 2. System ID—More than one AIM environment can be installed in the same data center, or in data centers that can communicate with each other.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Figure 4. Controller Web Management IP Address Settings. 4. Set the parameters for the SCN Network – which should be on the same subnet as the previously assigned IP address to the controller services. The DHCP and Discovery IP ranges must not overlap and it is recommended that you have sufficiently large number of available IP addresses available for your environment. Figure 5.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment 5. In our scenario, the DHCP IP addresses would not be used since the Exchange Servers and Active Directory have static IP addresses. This does not affect the ability to re-target a failed persona on a stand-by server. Installing the AIM License file and Final Steps Once the installation is complete, the utility will prompt to copy the license.dat file provided when the software was registered.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment AIM CLI Editor Setup and Use AIM Editor Software provides a Command-line Interface (CLI) to configure, control and monitor the AIM environment. It is distributed as part of Dell AIM Software Development Kit (SDK). Starting CLI on Linux machine The CLI can be accessed on a Linux machine with SDK installed. Typically the Linux machine running the controller software has the SDK installed.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Migrating Exchange 2010 to AIM Environment The Exchange 2010 solution considered in this paper consists of a two-copy DAG. We migrate one Exchange 2010 multi-role servers one at a time in order to keep the databases available during the migration process. Server Migration Utility (SMU) is used to copy the OS bits to the shared storage and prepare them for net booting2.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment 4. Identify the Fabric C NIC‘s Upon reboot, press to enter the Network Configuration Menus. In the lab deployment, the NIC‘s on Fabric C or PCI bus 05:00:00 and 5:00:01 were used for SCN networking. Note these two MAC addresses. In the MBA Configuration menus for these two C channel NIC‘s choose the boot protocol as PXE. All the other NIC‘s can be set to the default option (None).
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Create three AIM networks corresponding to three Exchange networks. Configure AIM Networks While creating the networks, we added persona to them, which essentially establishes network connections between the persona and the AIM networks. Once AIM networks are created, they should be configured as per the persona requirements.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Deploying Exchange with AIM - A Greenfield scenario This section describes setting up an Exchange with AIM environment in a Greenfield scenario. A Greenfield scenario assumes that both AIM and Exchange are yet to be deployed. We first set up the AIM environment, and then deploy Exchange into the environment.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Creation of Personas Refer to the persona creation section. Creation of Server Pools Refer to the server pool creation section. Creating and Configuring AIM Networks Refer to the Creating and Configuring AIM Networks section. Boot-up Persona and Install Agent Refer to the Boot Persona and Install Agent Section Install Exchange Server Once the persona is up and ready with the agent, you can install Exchange 2010.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Disks (per storage unit) RAID LUN‘s (per storage unit) Total Number of Active Databases Total Number of Passive Databases EqualLogic Controller Firmware Number of pools 16 x 500GB 7.2k SATA 2 x { RAID 10 of 14 disks + 2 hot spares } 2 (1 active / 1 passive) 2 2 5.0.5 2 (1 member per pool) Memory Requirement = 4 GB + 9MB per mailbox x 1800 users = at least 20GB.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Figure 8. Exchange 2010 active database latencies Figure 9. Exchange 2010 passive database latencies The average write latency for an active copy should be less than 20 ms, and indicates the time it takes to write to a database file. Latencies on passive copies are typically higher since the IO size is larger. Note that higher passive copy latencies will have no impact on end-user experience and functionality.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Log Latencies Log writes are indicators of the time taken to write log buffers to log files, and are indicators of active copy performance. The log writes are sequential, and hence these transactions should be faster. The threshold is 10 ms, and measured values are within the acceptable range. Log reads indicate the typical time to read from a log file, and indicate log replay performance. These values are within the desired range.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment RPC Results The ‗MSExchangeIS\RPC Requests‘ counter indicates the number of Remote Procedure Call (RPC) requests that are being handled by the Information Store. The target limit specified for this counter is 70. The ‗RPC Averaged Latency‘ counter indicates the latency for all operations in the last 1024 packets and should be below 10 ms. Figure 12 shows the results for RPC requests for all three scenarios.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Exchange queue lengths This section discusses the performance in terms of various queue lengths. The copy queue length measures the number of logs that need to be copied from the active to the passive log folder, and should be below. The replay queue length is the number of logs that are waiting to be replayed to the passive copy, and the target value of this counter should be less than 5.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Figure 15. Queue length – hub transport Disk Latencies This section describes the disk performance with Exchange installed and booted on local disks (Scenario 1) v/s Exchange booted from SAN (Scenario 2 and 3). The performance counters represent the latency for Windows Server 2008 R2 with Exchange on local disk vs. Exchange on EqualLogic PS4000X single array SAN as a RAID10 array.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Processor and Memory Utilization This section discusses the processor and memory utilization in all the three scenarios. The processor utilization was targeted at less than 75% at all times as a design validation requirement. This ensures that all processes within the server are being executed in a timely fashion.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment Summary The paper focuses on a method to migrate Exchange 2010 SP1 to an AIM managed environment – A brownfield scenario. It also provides guidelines to freshly deploy Exchange 2010 in a newly configured AIM environment. It is goes without saying that once migrated, Exchange 2010 in AIM environment should be validated to see possible impact on its performance.
Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment References Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager http://www.dell.com/aim Dell Email Solutions http://www.dell.
