Exchange Clustering Day 1

After getting the RAM and HBA's into the server, it racked, heartbeat connected and LAN connection we installed the OS and patched them. We've named them A and B and got the carving work all set on the SAN. We've carved up 64GB for logs, 100GB for private store and 150GB for public store. We've also carved us 500mb for the Quorum drive and 5GB for the exchange mounts. The exchange LUN is to minimize the amount of drive letters that will show up in the server. There will only be C: E: and Q: NO D: F: G: H: Why? Here is why. In the drive labled exchange there will be mount points to the transaction logs, the private information store and public information store. Normally these mounts would have been drive letters in my computer.

Then we'll turn off one of the servers. In this case B. We'll assign the the Quorum and exchnage LUN to server A and run diskpart to offset the disk for performance.

diskpart
select disk #
create partition primary align=64

Do this for each LUN as per EMC's best practice.

Shut down server A and bring up server B. On server B we'll just assign the LUNs that we've just assigned to A. (NOTE you technically are not suppose to assign a sign LUN to two servers the acception is in a cluster environment which we are implementing. This is why one server is turned off). Once assigned we can run cluster manager. It does not matter what server we are on as long as one of them is turned off.

On cluster administrator click open and create new cluster. Add the current server to the cluster. This server will be in the cluster alone for now and most importantly LOCK the shared LUN's so the other server cannot write to it when it's turned back on. Add the name of the other server in the wizard. Once done turn the other server back on. Open cluster administrator on that server ( the one just turned on) and run the wizard but select add node to cluster.

The cluster should be all set up now. You should see your heartbeat and LAN connections under networks. You will have to setup disks in the Cluster group for all your LUN's even the LUN's that are mount point in the Exchnage LUN created eariler. You should also see who the server owner is for the disk are at that given time. There can only be one server owner for the disks. You can change owners which will shift the disks over to the other server by right clicking on Cluster group and move group. This will move the disks manually over to the other server in the node. This will automatically happen in the event that something happens to the active server. I am setting up an active/passive cluster BTW.

Exchange install tomorrow.