WHITE PAPER. VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange Migrating Your Exchange Storage To a Storage Area Network with

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000 Migrating Your Exchange Storage To a Storage Area Network with VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents...2 Overview...3 Storage Configuration Wizard How It Works...3 Consider All Storage As Free...3 Use Current Free Storage...4 Storage Configuration Logic...4 Existing Storage...4 Backup Considerations...4 Microsoft Exchange 2000 Setup...5 Hot Spares...5 Storage Consolidation on the Storage Area Network...5 Rolling Out Production Servers Using the Cloning Process...9 Summary

3 OVERVIEW IT departments frequently engage in server and storage consolidation projects. It s an easy way to get approval for newer equipment by showing the cost justification of lower hardware maintenance costs and of not having to hire additional personnel to manage system growth. An important part of this consolidation effort is migrating users data from locally attached server storage to a storage area network (SAN) environment. Migrating your Microsoft Exchange data to a SAN is a complicated process. You need to have a thorough understanding of your SAN hardware, your backup requirements, the performance characteristics of Microsoft Exchange and a good plan for growth. Typically hardware solutions only address issues such as fault tolerance. With VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000, however, you can manage both your storage and Exchange application through one common user interface that provides storage virtualization capabilities for centralized management of heterogeneous storage. Exchange administrators and system architects can simplify their Exchange 2000 planning and SAN migrations by using VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange A key component of VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000 is the Storage Configuration Wizard, which incorporates information from users service-level agreements, such as backup and recovery constraints, merges it with the new SAN storage devices and produces a plan for a new SAN storage environment that will have both fault tolerance and high performance. VERITAS Software is a leader in storage management solutions and puts this knowledge to work with the Storage Configuration Wizard. This paper describes the components of the Storage Configuration Wizard, how they work and how they could be used in a migration or consolidation project. STORAGE CONFIGURATION WIZARD HOW IT WORKS The Storage Configuration Wizard can be used to lay out the storage in a fault-tolerant and highperformance configuration. The wizard gathers your current storage hardware information, merges it with your Exchange configuration information (which you supply) and provides your system architects with a suggested layout based on existing service-level agreements. The layout is saved as an.xml file that can be renamed, edited and used for cloning multiple servers. The Storage Configuration Wizard uses two options when configuring your Exchange 2000 storage: Consider All Storage as Free and Use Current Free Storage. CONSIDER ALL STORAGE AS FREE This option examines all existing storage (the system volume is not included in the calculation for available storage) and produces a suggested fault tolerant layout that Exchange administrators and 3

4 system architects can use to plan their migration. It produces a suggested layout that system architects and Exchange administrators can review. The suggested layout is saved as an.xml file and can be renamed to reflect a more consistent naming convention for your requirements. The suggested layout can be used to perform what-if/modeling scenarios, or it can be implemented immediately. USE CURRENT FREE STORAGE In addition to proposing a suggested layout, similar to Consider All Storage as Free, this option also lets Exchange administrators move their existing Exchange 2000 objects to the new location on the SAN. This is discussed further in the migration and consolidation strategy sections of this paper. STORAGE CONFIGURATION LOGIC The basic components of the storage configuration logic are: existing storage, backup considerations, Exchange configuration and hot spares. EXISTING STORAGE VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000 includes technology that provides a single, unified abstraction for disk storage array subsystems. This technology integrates disk storage arrays with VERITAS storage management software. When hardware vendors provide VERITAS Software with a provider, VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000 Storage Configuration Wizard can detect the hardware RAID configuration and use this in calculating the storage layout. For example, if the storage configuration component detects hardware mirroring, it may create a software stripe over the hardware mirror. Thus, intelligently leveraging both hardware and software optimizes for fault tolerance and performance. Note: VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000 supports the following storage vendor arrays: Compaq MA8000/RA8000 Hitachi 9900 Lightening Series (9910/9960). Hitachi 9900 Lightning Series support also applies to the Hitachi Sanrise 2000 Series, Sanrise 2200 and Sanrise 2800 sold in Japan. This also applies to the Nihon Unisys SANArena 2000 Series, Sun StoreEdge 9900 Series, Unisys SANArena 2800, Sun StoreEdge 9960, Unisys SANArena 2200 and Sun StoreEdge VERITAS is currently working with other storage vendors to include additional array support with VERITAS products. BACKUP CONSIDERATIONS Size of Backup The size of the backup will answer the question How much data will you be backing up in your backup window? The system architects and Exchange administrators will still need to calculate the backup window based on the capacity and the throughput of the backup media. For example, both VERITAS NetBackup and VERITAS Backup Exec can sustain a rate of 75 GB/hr on LTO tape drives with Exchange 2000 data. The Storage Configuration Wizard does not create Exchange storage groups that are larger than the maximum size of the backup medium. 4

5 Possible Parallel Backups on This Server The number of parallel backups figures into determining how many storage groups to create. For example, if you select four databases and want to perform two parallel backups, the Storage Configuration Wizard will create two storage groups since only a single database can be backed up at once. Using multiple storage groups enables simultaneous backup of multiple (up to four) Exchange databases. Both NetBackup and Backup Exec support this feature. MICROSOFT EXCHANGE 2000 SETUP When you use the Storage Configuration Wizard to configure a Microsoft Exchange 2000 server, the wizard asks you a series of questions to determine an optimal number and size of storage groups and mailbox databases on your Exchange server: 1. The number of Exchange databases 2. The names of the databases (used for naming convention when creating the stores) 3. The number of users for each database 4. The size of each user s mailbox VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000 configures up to four storage groups, with a maximum of five databases in each storage group with Microsoft Exchange Enterprise Edition. HOT SPARES The Storage Configuration Wizard automatically configures a hot spare if there are enough drives at the time of configuration. A hot spare is an unused disk in a dynamic group that is identified as a replacement disk if any of the disks in the dynamic group fail. If you have a hot spare disk in a dynamic group and one of the disks in the same dynamic group fails, VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000 automatically replaces the failed disk with the hot spare. Hot spares can also be manually configured later if more storage is added to the SAN. If you already have a hardware mirror set, the wizard will suggest a storage layout that is more performance-oriented due to the existence of hardware redundancy. STORAGE CONSOLIDATION ON THE STORAGE AREA NETWORK Now that we have a good idea of how the Storage Configuration Wizard works, the Exchange administrator is ready to implement the migration of users Exchange 2000 data to the SAN. By using the Consider All Storage as Free option, we can plan the migration to the SAN by following the steps in the wizard and reviewing the results. Once both system architects and Exchange administrators agree on the suggested layout, it should be saved as with an appropriate name and saved in a project folder. During the implementation phase, the Exchange administrator will select the Use Current Free Storage option and proceed with the migration. 5

6 In this example, the hardware is a Compaq StorageWorks RA8000. The following steps detail a storage migration using VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000: Step 1 In this example, Harddisk16 is detected as striped mirrors by VAIL. The system volume is grayed out since the Storage Configuration Wizard will never use it. In this example, the Exchange administrator has selected 11 drives from the SAN to migrate the data. Step 2 By checking the box Incorporate existing Exchange objects you will be able to move existing Exchange databases to the SAN during the implementation phase of the consolidation. Since this is a 6

7 migration project and we don t wish to create any new Exchange databases, the number of different groups field will be 0. As a result, the size of backups and possible parallel backups are grayed out and the Storage Configuration Wizard will later migrate the data based on the existing Exchange environment. Step 3 At this point we are ready to migrate the data to the SAN from the suggested layout. The software RAID type that will be configured will be NORAID because VAIL detected that the hardware was already mirrored. The Storage Configuration Wizard did not produce a suggested layout that included a fault tolerant hot spare because the disks were already mirrored. Microsoft Exchange 2000 separates databases for messaging and streaming data. Since the.edb (messaging) and the.stm (streaming) Exchange databases have different I/O patterns, the Storage Configuration Wizard puts them on separate spindles for optimal performance. 7

8 The suggested layout has four basic categories: volumes, disks, files and a hot spare (if configured by the wizard). Step 4 Volumes: Information about the logical volumes created by VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange It includes the mount points, size and type of software RAID being used. Disk: Physical disk information Files: Location of Exchange 2000 files on the logical volumes created by the Storage Configuration Wizard and which files are located on a given volume Hot Spare: The physical hard disk that is used in case of a disk failure After you press the Implement Suggested Changes button, the existing Exchange objects will be migrated to the storage on the SAN. By viewing the console and tasks tabs you can follow the progress of the migration. 8

9 In this example, drive letters were assigned to the new logical volumes. You can access a volume through a drive letter or through a mount point. When you create a volume using the VERITAS Volume Manager 3.0 component of VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000, you specify which access method to use for the volume. When VERITAS Edition creates volumes for you as part of the Exchange storage configuration process, both drive letters and mount points are automatically specified for the volumes that contain Exchange data stores and transaction logs. If there are no available drive letters, only mount points are used. Although a mount point looks like a path to a file on your system drive, it is not. A mount point is a way of accessing volumes, which can be stored on other drives, as if the data is stored on your system drive. This enables VERITAS Edition to consolidate references to all of your volumes in one place on the system drive. The mount point is essentially a pointer to the volume. ROLLING OUT PRODUCTION SERVERS USING THE CLONING PROCESS Now that you have completed your storage consolidation project you may want to roll out this identical configuration to all of your sites that will use the same SAN storage. (The storage must be identical hardware.) This is typically the case when implementing a storage consolidation project. When VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000 is installed, the user inputs are captured in the VERITAS.ini file. When the Storage Configuration Wizard runs after the installation, information about the storage configuration is captured in the SuggestedLayout.xml file. The Exchange administrator can use these files to duplicate the installation and storage configuration of the original Exchange 2000 host to the rest of the production servers. 9

10 SUMMARY This paper describes how VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000 can help system architects and Exchange administrators migrate their Exchange 2000 data to the SAN. The Storage Configuration Wizard can be used to gather service-level agreements and backup requirements for Exchange data and provide a suggested storage layout for the new location of the Exchange objects and migrate the data to the SAN. By utilizing the SAN for the storage of their Exchange objects, customers can now take advantage of the storage virtualization and centralized management capabilities of VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange Other features of VERITAS Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000 include: Automated growth of Exchange data stores Off-host backup quick recovery from Exchange database corruption problems 10

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