Troubleshooting

Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment
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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. In such scenarios, Dell recommends that you set the persona mode to auto. In
auto mode, the AIM controller automatically picks either the access or trunk mode depending on
whether the persona is booted on a physical server or a virtual machine. If the persona is booted on a
physical server the mode will be set to trunk, and if the persona is booted on a virtual machine the
mode will be set to access.
AIM relies on centralized booting mechanisms in order to decouple an application/workload and its
execution environment (OS) from the underlying hardware. In this paper we consider iSCSI/PXE boot
from SAN as one of the methods of central booting. Centralized booting involves boot through Network
Interface Cards (NICs), and AIM prefers two NICs for SAN-booted operating systems. Two NICs help
provide redundancy and protect against boot NIC failures. We allocate two NICs associated with
modular switch fabrics C1 and C2 (fabric C) listed in Table-1 for boot NICs. Fabric C is assumed to be
unused in the Exchange-only environment. Fabric B (Table-1) is used for the Exchange iSCSI database
network, and Fabric A (Table -1) is used for both Exchange MAPI and replication networks.
Overview of Exchange
Microsoft Exchange Server is one of the leading enterprise messaging systems. Exchange 2010 is
comprised of multiple sub-systems, which are also known as server roles. A server role is an application
layer entity and multiple roles can be collocated on a single machine. Here is a quick overview of the
Exchange 2010 server roles:
1. Mailbox Server (MBX): A back-end server capable of hosting mailboxes and public folders.
Multiple MBX roles can be clustered using a Database Availability Group or DAG.
2. Client Access Sever (CAS): A server role that supports all messaging clients such as Outlook,
etc. and Exchange Web Services.
3. Hub Transport Server (Hub): A routing server that routes a message within the Exchange
organization.
4. Edge-Transport Server (Edge): A server role residing on the edge of the topology that routes
messages in and out of the Exchange organization.
5. Unified Messaging Server (UM): A server role that connects a PBX system to the Exchange
topology and helps combine voice and email messages into a single messaging infrastructure.
Note that this role is presently not supported on a Virtual Machine.
All server roles except the Edge Transport role can be collocated as a multi-role Exchange server. A
Domain Controller (Active Directory role) is required for Exchange 2010, and primarily provides user
authentication and domain name services to Exchange users. For the purposes of this paper, the
Mailbox, Client Access and Hub Transport roles are most relevant. A solution summary for 1800 users is
shown below in Table 2.
Exchange Database Availability Group
A Database Availability Group (DAG) forms the basis of native High Availability (HA) provided by
Exchange 2010. Essentially, a DAG is a cluster of mailbox servers responsible for hosting databases. In
case of failures affecting servers or storage, this cluster ensures availability at the database level. In
order to ensure high availability, databases have one active copy and one or more passive copies. In