Mimosa Nearpoint installation – Part deux

We continued the installation of Nearpoint today. Where we left off a couple of days ago was that the Storage Groups were not being seen by Nearpoint. After much investigation, we found that the npadmin user running the discovery service did not have enough privileges to have access to these stores. For now, we set it up to use Lisa Carr, so that we can do the discovery, and then we will re-visit that service user to give it the correct permissions for login.

After success with the privileges, we schedule “Shadowing” tasks on the individual Exchange datastores. This will essentially make a copy of the Exchange databases to the Mimosa “Shadow volume”, and the other part of the process is called “Extraction”. What this will do is read the messages in each mailbox and catalogue it in the Mimosa database. As you can imagine this is going to be quite a long process. The admin alone (which is about 14GB) took about 1 hour just to copy the database, and approximately another 3 hours to read 22 mailboxes. so now, do the math for the remaining storage groups with the 2500+ mailboxes.

We scheduled the discoveries following this schedule:

• Admin Store: start @ 1:00pm on 03/13
• District Office: start @ 4:00pm on 03/13
• School Sites: start @ 11:00pm on 03/13
• Teachers: start @ 5:00am on 03/14

I’ll be checking on the process intermittently over the weekend. If interested in checking it, you can connect to do-mimosa, and open NearPoint Admin, click on Job Monitoring, and drill down to see the details of the running jobs.

Problems:

During the copy of the Exchange databases, we found that the iSCSI throughput is extremely low. the network usage on the Task Manager was somewhere between 0.80% and 2% at all times. I haven’t really been able to pin point a particular trend. this morning when I was looking at the Exchange backup, I noticed that 145Gb took 9 hours to complete, which is fairly slow. This afternoon, I tried to copy 400Mb file from Exchange D: drive to Backup, and it copied in about 35 seconds, and the same file from file:////do-gmk-dt/install$/isos to the Mimosa Shadow volume residing on the SAN, and it also copied in about 25 seconds, and the network utilization was actually correct, (about 40% during the copy), on both the primary (incoming) adapter, and the iSCSI (outgoing) adapter.

I will be doing some additional tests on Monday, and checking with Richard to see what may be causing the bottle-neck.

• This work was performed between 10:30 and 2:00pm on 03/13/2009