- Brazoria County on coast the north west edge gulf, population of 330,242

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1 TAGITM Presentation April 30 th 2:00 3:00 slot 50 minutes lecture 10 minutes Q&A responses History/Network core upgrade Session Outline of how Brazoria County implemented a virtualized platform with a SAN or storage area network and migrated from Exchange 2003 to Exchange Intro Brazoria County presence - Brazoria County on coast the north west edge gulf, population of 330,242 - Over 1400 employees - About 40 satellite offices T1 and fiber, several campus fiber. - About 1300 clients on network. - Spent a year planning for budgetary considerations, hardware and equipment research and proofing, software requirements and fulfilling license obligations. At the end of our research we developed three primary objectives: I. Upgrade network core, peripherals and switching environment. II. Implement expandable virtualized environment with SAN (storage area network) solution. III. Migrate to Exchange 2010 with Exchange 2013 to follow.

2 Environment History A. Exchange platform Slide illustrates the axis of our existing Exchange environment and how it evolved over the years. - OS server 2003 Std, maxed out on disc space, RAM, some past end of life - Application Server hosted Microsoft Exchange 2003 Std - Journaling Server - Frontend Server Web Authentication Portal - Spam Filter Appliance - LTO tape drive A. Network Core Little redundancy 2. Limited expandability MB bottlenecks over LANs and WAN 4. All server connections CAT 5 to switch in data center, 1 Gb limitation 5. All switching back to In rack switching Major considerations for our network core upgrade: - failover redundancy - traffic management X. Network core upgrade. - Twin Cisco Nexus 5596 switches replacing 4500 series switch - The Nexus 5500s are Data Center Class Switches - FCoE fiber channel over Ethernet capable -Can be configured to accept copper as well as fiber Ethernet connections - Provide up to 10 Gig channel through put - Utilize Virtual machine-optimized services - Collectively can provide nearly 2 TBPS of throughput

3 - Twin Cisco 3945 T1 routers replacing 3745 series routers - Integrated Services Gen 2 platform - Multicore processors - Fiber connective capable - Twin 2960 Cisco managed switches - Handle equipment unable to move to Nexus core - Cable matrix shows most equipment has 2 nd core connection - In-rack switching, redundancy, load balancing and failover, traffic management - Added Cisco 2K FEX rack switches adding fiber backbone to data center - Provides a virtualization aware unified server-access architecture - with up to 10 GBPS throughput from rack to core - extending the Nexus FCoE capabilities - 10 GB throughput capable Virtualization VSphere and Veeam SAN Now that our Core upgrade was complete we were ready to move forward with our virtualized environment. We knew that we wanted to virtualize our new exchange application but we also wanted further room for growth. With this being the case, we reached out to Dell and Waypoint to help us design and implement our first virtualized environment. Our first step after deciding to use VMWare vsphere, which is VMware s cloud computing virtualization operating system, was to choose the hardware and networking solutions that would meet our present and future needs. Ω Our previous experiences with a single bare metal exchange server left us with no redundancy; Ω preventing us from giving our users an exact time frame in which services would be unavailable should problems arise. It was critical that our new environment allowed us little to no down time, and our new environment along with two hosts was going to allow for this.

4 Ω The hardware that we choose for this project was two Dell Power Edge R720 servers, with two Dell Equalogic PS6100 SAN s or Storage Area Networks as well as two Dell 6224 Power Connect internal rack switches. Ω Our Dell Power Edge R720 s would be our hosts, which we configured to run ESXi 5.1 this is the version of our type 1 hypervisor. Ω A type 1 hypervisor is installed on a bare metal server without an operating system. Ω The hypervisor s job is to provide our virtual machines with virtual hardware as well as provide the appropriate share of physical resources to the virtual machine or VM as defined by us. A virtual machine or VM can be used to host many applications from file servers, database servers, servers and even high performance application servers. We made sure that the host servers that we we re going to use were going to allow us room for many more VM s past this project and planned the specs accordingly. The Dell Power Edge R720 servers are equipped with dual six-core processors for a total of 24 logical processors each along with 132 Gigs of Ram, providing us with more than enough overhead for the addition of future VM s. For storage we decided on two Dell Equalogic P6100 Storage Area Networks or SAN each equipped with 15TB of storage.ω This will be the location for our data stores, snapshots and backups. A data store when referenced to VMware is a storage container for files. Inside the data store are the locations in which our VM s will be located along with VM configuration files and ISO s used to install on VM s. Each SAN would be connected to an ESXi 5.1 server or host via iscsi and placed in a nested RAID (5+0) configuration; here one drive from each of our RAID 5 sets could fail without the loss of data. For our networking solution we choose two Dell 6224 Power Connect internal rack switches that would help reduce single points of network failure for all ports. Ω Within our virtual environment we wanted not only room to grow but an efficient way to let us fully manage our VM s as well as utilize extensive features found within vsphere vcenter. vcenter is a data center management application used to manage and monitor our virtualized environment. Ω As such we installed vcenter server as an appliance on our primary host, there we can access it internally on our network via the vsphere Client. vsphere Client is the interface used for administering the vcenter Server, once connected vcenter server provides us with a manageable graphical user interface where we can make changes as needed from creating templates for future deployments, to vmotion between hosts for hardware upgrades as well as automation on the fly. With

5 vcenter server we ll also be able to add new hosts as needed and be able to manage and cluster them in the future for environmental expansion. Ω Here we configured our Exchange Server VM in a vsphere high availability cluster between our two hosts. High availability will protect us in the case of host failures, host isolation and application crashes. Ω With In high ability, most users won t notice the hand off between active and failover VM as the exchange is immediate and doesn t usually exceed one minute. As you can tell our main objective was for a fully redundant environment. Ω Virtualization gave us an opportunity to research multiple backup solutions for our new environment. We had narrowed our choices between Symantec Backup Exec 2012 or Veeam Backup and Replication; each product had its strengths and weaknesses. After comparing the two found that Veeam was designed especially for VM s with very little overhead and is completely agentless, whereas with Symantec each VM would have been required to have a remote agent installed. Veeam also allowed us instant VM and file-level recovery on a granular field. Ω Not only now could we save our backups off site at one of our remote locations, we were able to automate our backups and configure a scheduled plan for incrementals and deduplication. With Veeam we were also given a feature called Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange; it enabled us to export items directly from our Veeam Backups of our Exchange 2010 VM. This includes the ability to selectively export items such as s, contacts and calendar entries; whether they are from compressed, deduplicated or incremental backups. The final step in our project was the actual implementation and migration of our new Exchange Platform. Here is Cyndi Lara to further explain this process.

6 Exchange migration installation and process I. Current Exchange environment A. The need for upgrade 1. End of Life 2. Continuous error messages 3. Need to reboot often II. Hardware & Software specs A. Dell B. Waypoint III. Exchange 2010 Licensing Requirements A. Waypoint recommended IV. Problems we experienced A. Mail flow B. SSL Certificates C. ECP D. Public Folders V. Check & Verify A. Recipient policy B. Outlook XP not supported with Exchange Still had some client s with Office XP version VI. The moving of mailboxes A. Communication with key person from each department 1. The need to shutdown client outlook 2. The need to delete all accounts on other devices a. Smartphones b. Ipads VII. Decommission old Exchange 2003 Dell, Waypoint