Troubleshooting

Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment
Page 4
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. The pool allows adding or reducing the number of servers fulfilling the
service availability needs provided by the datacenter based, for example, on computational load.
This paper describes a method to integrate an existing Microsoft™ Exchange 2010 SP1 (henceforth
referred to as Exchange 2010) ecosystem with AIM environment by taking advantage of Exchange 2010‘s
native high availability – a Brownfield scenario. It also provides guidelines to freshly deploy Exchange
2010 into AIM environment – a Greenfield scenario. The environment that provides flexibility in
managing a datacenter should also be validated for ease of integrating workloads to it. It should be
ensured the environment does not hamper the performance of the workloads it supports.
The paper summarizes the results of lab exercises for Exchange 2010 running in a standalone (without
being managed by AIM) environment and in an AIM-managed environment. The performance comparison
over these scenarios indicates that IT departments can take advantage of AIM while seeing minimal
impact on the performance of their Exchange 2010 infrastructure. The primary measures for
performance were: Exchange Database Read Latencies, Exchange Database Write Latencies, and
Exchange Log Write Latencies.
Audience and Scope
This whitepaper is intended for sales engineers, IT administrators, and field engineers interested in
quickly getting a grip on Dell AIM and Exchange 2010 co-existence. The paper covers Exchange 2010
migration to an AIM environment as a series of summarized steps both in Brownfield and Greenfield
scenarios.
In order to ensure that the AIM environment would not affect Exchange 2010 performance, lab results
for running Loadgen (an Exchange sizing tool from Microsoft) in a standalone Exchange environment
and in an AIM managed environment have been shown as proof points. The paper helps answer the
following concerns:
- Is there a performance impact for Outlook users connecting to Exchange on AIM versus an
identical deployment without AIM?
- How can the boot- and application-specific networks be provisioned effectively in an AIM
environment?
- How do field engineers and administrators migrate their Exchange deployments to AIM with
minimal impact to the organization‘s users?