Introduction

This document explains in detail how to successfully P2V Exchange 2003. The physical hosts originally hosting Exchange were experiencing hardware failures causing the servers to spontaneously reboot several times a week. These servers were over 5 years old and without warranties. Because of the size of the mailbox stores, we were also out of hard drive space. With an email archiving solution about to be implemented, immediately followed by an Exchange 2007 upgrade, our current Exchange system needed to be stable and survive until after the eVault project was complete. Our solution: Virtualize!

Intended Audience

VI administrators, Exchange administrators, and SAN administrators may find this document useful when attempting to P2V Exchange 2003.

Outline

The topics covered in this paper are written for the technical personnel that will be performing the staging and actual migration of the Exchange system

• Pre-Staging

• Determine LUN sizes required

• size of mail stores

• anticipated growth

• number of Exchange servers

• Connection type for hosts to VI

• Copy tool/utility

• P2V method (i.e. cold convert, hot convert)

• Staging

• Connecting host to SAN

• Creating LUN's

• Adding drives to host

• The Move

• Copying the data

• P2V convert

• Cleanup

• Disconnect host from SAN

• Bring Exchange VM online

• Add new data LUN's to Exchange VM

Author

http://www.kadlecmed.org/

Tim Harper

Graduated with B. Sc. in Computer Science 2001. Worked developing hardware control, data acquisition and analysis software for DOE at PNNL in Richland WA from 1998-2003. Began career in healthcare in 2003 at Kadlec Medical Center as an Application Analyst working with web development and integration. Was promoted twice in 5 years first to Systems Analyst, then to Sr. Systems Analyst. Now responsible for Physician Portal, electronic health record system, virtual infrastructure along with complete data center management and enterprise system project management.

Disclaimer

You use this proven practice at your own discretion. VMware and the author do not guarantee any results from the use of this proven practice. This proven practice is provided on an as-is basis and is for demonstration purposes only.

Proven Practice: P2V Exchange 2003

PRE-STAGING

Determining LUN Sizes

Our Exchange environment consisted of two Exchange servers serving 13 stores and 2054 mailboxes. Because of the lack of a dedicated administrator and the explosive growth of the hospital, the size of the mailbox stores got out of control and became unmanageable and too large to complete consistent maintenance on them. With the server running out of disk space, we had no other options to remedy this issue.

In total, our mailboxes came to approximately 391 GB across the two physical hosts. To allow for growth as well as the ability to remedy the large data store issue, we decided to have 3 raw LUN's of 200 GB each. Because best practices advises that hard drives larger than 75 GB should be used as RAW drives, that was the route we took.

Connection Type

We had two viable choices to connect to the SAN with. We could connect using 1 Gb ethernet and use TCP/IP to copy the data over to a temporary "holding" VM or we could install a HBA into the host and connect using FC. Because of the huge amount of data that needed to be copied across coupled with enterprise email being down during the copy process, we elected to go with speed. We used an Emulex FC-2142SR HBA to connect to the SAN. We have an EMC CX3-40 with 4 Gb fabric switches so, along with the 4 Gb card, we had a ton of bandwidth.

Copy Tool/Utility

There are an almost unlimited number of choices that could have been used to do the actual copy. However, we were most familiar and had had previous success with host to SAN copying using Robocopy. This utility gave us a tremendous amount of granularity of how we wanted to copy the data, what kind of information we wanted to know about the process, as well as a comfort level from previous experience with the tool.

P2V Method

With our current Exchange server already experiencing what we were sure were hardware failures, we wanted to eliminate as many possibilities for trouble by only loading the drivers needed for the disk copy. There was a huge amount of data and the downtime needed was already pushing the limits of what our users were willing to tolerate. We could not afford to attempt the data copy more than once. Because of these things we decided it would be best if we did a cold P2V, and allow converter to only load the drivers it needed to complete its job.

STAGING

Connecting to SAN

Connecting the Exchange host to the SAN was fairly simply and straight forward. The host was shutdown and the HBA was inserted. Once the host was powered back on, the drivers for the HBA were installed and the fiber cable was plugged into the SAN and the card.

Creating LUN's

The three 200 GB LUN's were created on our SAN using the Navi-Sphere management software. We again followed VMWare's best practice for spreading the LUN's across RAID groups and spindles. A path was then created through the SAN's switch fabric for the Exchange host to be able to see the created LUN's.

Adding Drives to Host

Using Windows Server 2003's Disk Management utility, each of the LUN's were added using three unused drive letters. Each drive was quick formatted for NTFS and named appropriately to keep them identified for each data store in Exchange.

THE MOVE

Copying

With the new hard drives showing in the drive listing, everything was ready for the copying of data. The Exchange services were brought off line and Robocopy was fired up. We used a number of switches that we believed would help us see where the copy process was and a log that would hopefully give us some useful information should it fail. The switches used are solely up to the user. http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/07/robocopy-syntax-command-line-switches-a nd-examples

The actual copy time was roughly 2 hours for each 200 GB of data.

P2V

Once all the data had been copied off the host, it was rebooted with the Converter CD. The usual conversion steps were taken to convert the Exchange server into the infrastructure. With just having the system partition left for the conversion, it only took approximately 20 minutes to complete.

CLEANUP

Disconnect Host from SAN

With the old Exchange host being powered off from the finish conversion, the HBA was removed and the fiber cable disconnected from the SAN. For some good house keeping we also removed paths from switch fabric for old host.

Bring Exchange VM Online

The new Exchange VM then had all the extraneous hardware removed under "settings", and was then powered on.

Add New Data LUN's

As was done with the old Exchange host, the Disk Management utility was used to add the new data LUN's to the new Exchange VM. The Exchange services were then brought back online with the new drive mappings and all was well.