Troubleshooting

Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment
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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. The AIM
controller will then detect that there has been a failure in the managed pool and will re-target the
failed operating system image along with the application on to the stand-by server. The original
distribution of databases can then be restored on the running servers. A pool of servers can be assigned
to these personas or images on SAN. AIM can automatically restore normalcy or provide availability to
IT environments.
Exchange Sample Solution Summary
Table 2. Exchange 2010 test solution summary
Number of mailboxes
1800
Average user I/O profile (messages/day)
.15 IOPS (~160 messages/day)
Average mailbox size limit
512MB
Total active/passive copies per database
2
Not included in this solution
Backup and recovery infrastructure
Disaster recovery or site resiliency
UM and Edge roles
Server Configurations
Detail
Multi-role (Mailbox/Hub/CAS) server
2x PowerEdge M610 servers
2x quad-core processors and 48GB of RAM
Active Directory servers
2x PowerEdge M610 server
2x quad-core processors and 48GB of RAM
Number of DAGs
1
Servers per DAG
2
Number of Active and Passive Mailboxes per
Server
900 active + 900 passive
Storage Configuration
Details
Storage hardware
2x EqualLogic PS6000E
16 drives each; 32 total drives
Data volumes per mailbox server
2
Databases per volume
1
Mailboxes per database
900
Disk type
3.5‖ 7.2k rpm SATA – 500GB
RAID type
RAID 10
Additional details
Databases and logs combined;
1 volume = 1 DB + 1 Log
38% estimated capacity for growth
NTFS allocation unit size = 64KB
For the above deployment, 48 GB of RAM was used across the board for non-AIM and AIM environment
test results. As explored in the results section, 20 GB per server should be sufficient.
Exchange has its own application-specific networks, namely the public/MAPI (Messaging API) network,
primarily used by Active Directory/Domain controller to communicate to the mailbox servers and a
private/replication network used for log-based synchronization of databases in the Database