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Dell PowerVault MD1000 2000 Mailbox Clustered Continuous Replication Microsoft Exchange2007 Storage Solution


Dell PowerVault MD1000
2000 Mailbox Clustered Continuous
Replication Microsoft Exchange2007
Storage Solution





















Tested with: ESRP Storage Version 2.0
Tested Date:
July 16, 2007

2
Table of Contents

Table of Contents .................................................................................2

Overview ............................................................................................3

Disclaimer...........................................................................................3

Features .............................................................................................4

Solution Description .............................................................................5

Targeted Customer Profile ..................................................................8

Tested Deployment............................................................................8

Simulated Exchange Configuration: ...................................................8

Primary Storage Hardware ...............................................................9

Primary Storage Software ................................................................9

Primary Storage Disk Configuration (Mailbox Store Disks) ..................10

Primary Storage Disk Configuration (Transactional Log Disks) .............10

Replication Configuration ..................................................................11

Replicated Storage Hardware .........................................................11

Replicated Storage Software ..........................................................12

Replicated Storage Disk Configuration (Mailbox Store Disks) ...............12

Replicated Storage Disk Configuration (Transactional Log Disks) .........12

Best Practices ....................................................................................13

Backup strategy ..............................................................................15

Contact for Additional Information ........................................................15

Test Result Summary..........................................................................16

Reliability .......................................................................................16

Primary Storage Performance Results.................................................17

Streaming Backup/Recovery Performance ...........................................17

Database Read-only Performance....................................................17

Log Read-only Performance............................................................18

Backup to disk Performance ................. Error! Bookmark not defined.

Conclusion ........................................................................................18

Appendix A: Performance Testing .........................................................19

Performance Test Result Report.........................................................19

Database Checksum Test Result Report ..............................................21

Appendix B: Stress Testing..................................................................23

Stress Test Result Report .................................................................23

Stress Test - Database Checksum Result Report ..................................25

Appendix C: Streaming Backup Testing .................................................27

Streaming backup Test Result Report .................................................27

Appendix D: Soft Recovery Testing .......................................................29

SoftRecovery Test Result Report........................................................29

SoftRecovery Performance Test Result Report......................................31

Database Checksum Test Result Report ..............................................33

3
Overview


This document provides information on Dells PowerVault MD1000 storage
solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, based on Microsoft Exchange
Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP) Storage program*. The ESRP
Storage program was developed by Microsoft Corporation to provide a
common storage testing framework for vendors to provide information on its
storage solutions for Microsoft Exchange Server software. For more details
on the Microsoft ESRP Storage program, please click
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/2007/esrp.mspx

















Disclaimer

This document has been produced independently of Microsoft Corporation.
Microsoft Corporation expressly disclaims responsibility for, and makes no
warranty, express or implied, with respect to, the accuracy of the contents of
this document.

THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY
CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE
CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND.

© Dell Inc. 2007. All rights reserved. Dell, PowerEdge, PowerVault, and the
Dell logo are trademarks of Dell Inc. Other trademarks and trade names are
the property of their respective owners and Dell disclaims proprietary interest
in the marks and names of others.

4
Features


This white paper describes a tested and validated storage solution for a 2000
mailbox Exchange 2007 environment with Cluster Continuous Replication
(CCR). CCR is a high availability clustering mechanism based on the MSCS
majority node set (MNS) model. It requires an active and a passive set of
Exchange Mailbox server nodes each of which maintain their own copy of the
mailbox databases. Mail clients access the primary (active) server, and
database changes to it are shipped to the secondary (passive) server in the
form of log records. The shipped log records are played on the secondary
server to keep the secondary database copies consistent with the primary.

Dell PowerVault MD1000 is a SAS based storage enclosure. The major
features of the storage system include:

Capacity for either 15 3.5-inch, hot-plug, 3.0-Gbps, serial-attached
SCSI (SAS) hard drives or 15 3.5-inch, hot-plug, Serial ATA (SATA)
hard drives
Support for up to three daisy-chained storage enclosures in unified
mode for a total of 45 hard drives
Host-based RAID support via a PERC 5/E adapter
In-band enclosure management provided through SCSI enclosure
services (SES)
RAID and system management using Dell OpenManage Server
Administrator Storage Management Service

Even though each PowerVault MD1000 enclosure supports up to 15 drives,
the solution presented in this paper utilizes a total of 12 disks, 10 for
Exchange information stores and 2 for transaction logs. One disk may be
configured as a hot-spare. The remaining 2 disks provides for some head
room for future growth within the same enclosure. For further expansion
additional enclosures can be daisy-chained to support up to 45 drives.
5
Solution Description
The Dell PowerVault MD1000 is a modular disk storage expansion
enclosure for PowerEdge servers capable of housing up to fifteen 3.5-inch
disk drives in a single 3U rackable chassis. The direct attached storage
enclosure supports both Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA)
disk drives.

Dell PowerVault MD1000 Windows Server Catalog Listing














Figure 1: Dell PowerVault MD1000 enclosure with 15 drives

PERC 5/E is the RAID controller used to connect the PowerVault MD1000
storage enclosure to the Exchange server. It supports 3 Gbps Serial Attached
SCSI (SAS) as the storage interconnect technology and PCI Express (PCI-E)
as the host-based interconnect technology.
The PERC 5/E controller offers:
Intel IOP333 I/O processor based on Intel XScale Microarchitecture
256MB of customized DDR2 400MHz, Error-Correcting Code (ECC)
cache memory
3 Gbps maximum speed for each SAS lane
Two external x4 (by four) SAS ports, each aggregating 4 SAS lanes
for a total bandwidth per port of 12.0 Gbps
6
x8 PCI E host interface for a total bandwidth of 32.0 Gbps
Up to 72 hours of intelligent, transportable, battery-backed, cache
memory


The presented solution is a CCR solution for up to 2000 mailboxes. It
includes a single PowerEdge 2950 server directly attached to Dell PowerVault
MD1000 storage enclosure on the primary site. The secondary site is
configured to be identical to the primary. The primary and secondary storage
do not share storage array controllers or disks.

The tested user profile was 0.5 IOPS per user (0.42 IOPS per user with 20%
headroom) with a 300 MB mailbox size.





Figure 2: Test Set up Diagram



Microsoft Exchange Server System:

Server
Dell PowerEdge 2950
CPU
2 Intel®Xeon®CPU;5160@3.00GHz
7
Memory
16 GB DDR2 ECC
NIC
Broadcom NeXtreme II
RAID Controller PERC 5i (FW Version 1.00.01-0088)
Internal Disks
2 Seagate 73 GB 15K RPM SAS (ST373454SS)

Storage System:
Storage System Dell PowerVault MD1000
Disks
15 Seagate 300GB 15K RPM SAS
(ST33006555ss/Rev S512) Drives
RAID Controller PERC 5E (FW Version 1.03.10-0216)