From: Ehren Benson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: Exchange 2007 Cluster
What were the misconfigurations you ran into?
1. Whoever installed the OS and updates did "something" wrong as
Exchange 2007 refused to install on any of the blades. The blades had to be
completely rebuilt. After that, there were no issues with installed Ex 07.
2. Whoever installed the software on the blades to allow the blades to
connect with the SAN did "something" wrong. The blades refused to see the
SAN/LUNs or anything else. After #1 and reinstalling the SAN software on
just the blades to be used for the CCR cluster, all SAN access was fine.
3. For "some" reason, setting up the first node in the Windows cluster
didn't go very well. Even though the Majority Node Set was selected during
the setup, a second node could not be added. When checking the
configuration of the cluster it was set to Single Node with no option to
change it to anything else. #1 "fixed" that issue.
4. Whoever setup the blade knew which two blades were going to be used
for the cluster but failed to setup a private VLAN for the heartbeat NICs.
So, every 10 minutes, the nodes would stop seeing each other and the cluster
would failover. If it weren't file the File Share Witness, I am sure the
nodes would have been failing continuously. A new hardcore blade engineer
was sent out and he resolved that issue in short time.
5. Whoever was in charge of handing out internal and external IPs and
making changes to their external DNS is an absolute PITA. He yelled at me
for asking for a copy of their zone file. And yelled at me again for not
planning the DNS changes ahead of time even though it wasn't me who was in
charge of the fiasco, err I mean project.
6. The rest I will not mention in a public forum but without the help
of Michael B. Smith I would have quit my job that week. Matter of fact, I
almost did the last day I was there for the pilot phase.
7. Why did I almost quit? Never had worked with blades, nor an
Enterprise class SAN, nor a Windows cluster, not an Exchange cluster, nor
CCR and never a full transition from Ex 03 to Ex 07 on a scale this large
before with no help (besides MBS that is). Oh, did I mention I got chewed
out for using MBS? As you can probably tell, I am still just a "little"
upset over the whole fiasco. And yes, I did tell everyone in project mgmt
that I had ZERO experience with anything on this project.
OK, I'll shut up now.
Webster
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