Troubleshooting

Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment
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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. Fabrics B1 and B2 are used for iSCSI
connectivity to the Exchange mailbox store. The store consists of a total of 4 databases distributed
among two EqualLogic PS6000E storage enclosures. Each enclosure consists of one active and one
passive database copy. The AIM SCN network is used once Dell AIM has been introduced into the
environment. It resides on Fabric C.
The IP addresses are assigned dynamically in the AIM environment by a DHCP Server running on the
server running AIM controller. Two NIC‘s connected to Fabric C1 and C2 are bonded together to have a
network IP address of 192.168.14.5. As an alternative, the NIC attached to Fabric C1 can be assigned
this address and the NIC attached to fabric C2 can be left unconfigured. For deployment purposes, we
set up machines to run a Loadgen simulator and collect Performance data. These can be ignored for
production deployments.
In order to measure the performance of Exchange 2010 as accurately, Dell recommends that you design
and deploy separate storage groups for AIM operating system images (persona images) and Exchange
Databases/Information Store. Since the servers that are being managed by AIM receive IPs from the
DHCP server running on an AIM controller; the controller should have a range available to allocate the
IP addresses from. The AIM Web Console should be accessible using the management IP address from
other machines on the network.
Preparation for deploying AIM Software
This section explains how to prepare an environment to install AIM software. We planned to install AIM
controller on a Dell PowerEdge M610 blade server. The controller software runs on a Linux platform.
The Linux distribution recommended is Red Hat Enterprise Linux® version 5 update 5 (RHEL 5.5). The
following steps ensure creation of the correct environment for installing an AIM controller:
1. Install two PowerConnect M6220 switches into slots C1 and C2 with configurations per the
networking scheme.
2. Configure the ports on the Top of Rack 1 as per the networking scheme.
3. Configure the ports on the Top of Rack 2 as per the networking scheme.
4. Install RHEL 5.5 on the blade server designated as the AIM controller. The controller blade is
usually placed in slot 16 of the blade chassis.
5. During RHEL 5.5 installation:
o Use the default layout for partitions.
o For the Network Devices, remove the ‗Active on Boot‘ checkmark for eth0 and eth1 and
add the checkmark for eth4 and eth5. For simplicity, the AIM controller will use NICs
eth4 and eth5 on fabric C of the blade chassis. Fabric A and B are already used for
Exchange networking and iSCSI by other servers.
o The Software Development and Web Server packages do not need to be installed
o SELinux should be disabled.
6. On completion of RHEL 5.5, we are ready to configure the network interface setup.
o Dell recommends that you have bonded NICs for redundancy
o Optionally you can have a single network interface setup.
7. Configure your PowerEdge M1000e Modular enclosure Chassis Management Console.
8. Configure iDRAC users for all the servers that will be managed by AIM.