This post was authored by Varun Kulkarni of Global Solutions Engineering
Dell Avanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) can quickly recover a failed Exchange 2010 mailbox or mutli-role server, automatically, helping organizations to meet their recovery time objective without manual interventions. Dell AIM simplifies the server recovery and significantly reduces the recover time, as it takes hours of manual efforts otherwise, to bring up a failed Exchange server involving tasks like reprovisinoing server hardware and operating system with Exchange server 2010, and redistributing active Exchange databases, to list a few.
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Database Availability Group (DAG) enters a degraded state when one or more members of the DAG fail. The DAG members are typically mailbox servers or multi-role Exchange servers hosting Exchange databases that provide High Availability for the Exchange deployment. The degraded state of the DAG is due to the the Input / Output Operations per Second (IOPS) and latency for the failed database not meeting the expected performance. The failed DAG member should be recovered as soon as possible in order to recover the failed databases and reinstate the healthy state of the DAG. Depending on the failure, recovering a failed mailbox or multi-role server can be a complex and time consuming process which may involve significant manual intervention from the IT Department. A successive failure of another DAG member, in case of small or medium sized organizations, may result in loss of precious email data. Thus, delayed recovery of the failed DAG member is not recommended, as it can be catastrophic.
Apart from restoring the DAG to its healthy state in an automated way, AIM facilitates centralized management of the network and compute infrastructure within the Exchange ecosystem. It provides the ability to dynamically configure and manage Exchange MAPI (Messaging API) and DAG replication networks on multiple servers from a single console and provide resiliency to the network adapters. Using AIM, high availability can also be provided to the non-mailbox server roles including the Active Directory (AD) domain controller. A two-copy DAG configuration managed by Dell AIM software is shown here:
Engineers at Dell Global Solutions Engineering, showcase a detailed study of how a failed multi-role Exchange 2010 server can be quickly recovered automatically, restoring the DAG to its original healhy configuration, with AIM software, 12th generation Dell PowerEdge Servers and EqualLogic storage in a white paper, that can found here.
