Troubleshooting

Migrating Exchange 2010 To Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Environment
Page 5
Hardware Summary
This section provides an overview of the hardware used to study Exchange 2010 with AIM.
Table 1. Hardware used in this study
Servers
5x PowerEdge
TM
M610 blades hosted in 1x PowerEdge Modular enclosure M1000e
Storage arrays
2x EqualLogic
TM
PS6000E and 1x EqualLogic PS4000X
Switches
2x PowerConnect
TM
6248s - used as top of rack switches
6x PowerConnect M6220s:
Modular switch fabric A: modular switches A1 and A2 (2x PowerConnect M6220s)
Modular switch fabric B: modular switches B1 and B2 (2x PowerConnect M6220s)
Modular switch fabric C: modular switches C1 and C2 (2x PowerConnect M6220s)
Dell AIM and Its Components
Dell AIM is enterprise class software that allows you to detach your workload and its execution
environment (the Operating System (OS)) from your server hardware. AIM achieves this by supporting
Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) boot of an OS from a Storage Area Network (SAN). The operating
system and application no longer reside on the server‘s local hard drive, but are instead LUNs carved
out of a SAN. Along with central booting, AIM manages the switches and networking for the net booted
operating systems. Dell AIM and its environment primarily consist of following components:
AIM Controller
The Dell AIM controller is software that can manage both physical and virtual servers in a datacenter
environment. It runs on a dedicated server, and communicates with the environment via the existing
network infrastructure. The Controller also hosts the Dell AIM Console, a web-based user interface that
can be used to monitor and work with the elements in the Dell AIM environment. Apart from the web-
based interface, it provides both a Command-line Interface (CLI) and Application Programming
Interfaces (APIs).
Personas
AIM uses the concept of personas to isolate the application and its operating system from underlying
hardware. Personas are server environments captured on disk—the operating system, optional Dell AIM
agent software, application software, and networking components. The Dell AIM agent is a software
utility you can install when you create the persona; the agent reports detailed persona status to the
Controller and configures networking and other settings on the persona at the direction of the
Controller. Personas can reside on a server‘s local disk or on any of a number of types of Ethernet or
Fibre Channel network storage resources, including NAS, iSCSI, and SAN-based storage servers. When a
persona resides on network storage, the Controller can assign it to any appropriate network-bootable
server, or retarget it to a backup server in case the first server fails. In this paper we consider iSCSI
booted personas.
Management Consoles
There are two primary interfaces for managing and configuring an AIM 3.4 environment. The first is the
management web console accessed through an IP address entered during the start of controller setup.
The second is the CLI provided with the Software Development Kit (SDK), through which administrators
can enter commands in auto-complete mode. The CLI is used to configure switch parameters, add and
remove resources from the AIM environment, and etc. Once configured, the switches are managed by
AIM, and the management console can be used for most tasks.