Equallogic Hit Kit and NCM

[support27]

Hi there,

I'm currently planning a migration from Equallogic storage to Nimble (v2.0 installed).

The first application I'm looking at migrating is the Exchange 2010 environment, and currently the Exchange mailbox databases reside on an Equallogic PS6100 array connected via ISCSI to Windows 2008 R2 SP1 virtual machines.

Each Exchange server has the Equallogic Hit Kit (v3.5.1) installed which provides setup and configuration, MPIO capability, connection management, snapshot management, VSS provision etc.

Does anyone know or have come across any issues with running the Equallogic Hit Kit alongside the Nimble Windows Integration Toolkit (for setup and NPM) and the Nimble Connection Manager.

They sort of do similar things so I'd like to take advantage of both tools to optimize functionality during the migration while databases are residing on both types of storage.

I'll also be doing a similar process for migration of SQL and Sharepoint data and VMware datastores.

[Nick_Dyer]

Hello,

There are no problems running the EQL HIT kit alongside the Nimble Windows Toolkit... the only incompatibility resides in VSS snapshots; if you're using EQL ASM for Exchange snapshots then installing the Nimble toolkit will conflict because you're installing a second VSS implementation on the same host.

Hope that helps in your planning & design.

[support27 · Accepted solution]

Hi Nick,

Thanks for the reply.

I guessed that VSS would be a problem - we don't use scheduled Equallogic snapshots using ASM to protect Exchange or SQL databases due to the limitations of how many snapshots you can take and the related performance hits (hence the reason to go Nimble!), however the backup solution we implement uses the Equallogic VSS HW Provider, so this may be where we would encounter issues

Not sure if anyone has any best practices for performing online migrations of this kind (Exchange/SQL) from other storage providers to Nimble.

My high level plans would be something like this:

Install all pre-requisites for NWT on mailbox servers

Install and configure NWT on mailbox servers

Provision new volumes on Nimble in line with capacity plan

Present Nimble storage to each mailbox server in DAG

Create new mailbox databases using new storage

Configure protection policies etc.

Migrate mailboxes to new databases within Exchange

Remove Equallogic storage

Uninstall Hit Kit

Cheers,

Mark