I finally got our new PowerEdge 2950 mounted in the server cabinet and I’m starting to get it set up.
It’s been a while since I last ordered a PowerEdge from Dell. The last one was about three years ago, an 1800 we were going to use for an online storage backup. Sort of a poor man’s NAS.
This server is destined to be the back-end for our mail server. Our existing mail server topology consists of a single mail server in a single-serer Exchange topology. From what I’ve gathered the Exchange Server 2003 topoogy can be configured to allow two servers to focus on more specifc areas of the mail server application role. I’m very excited to try this out!
So as I have come to understand it, one server will now focus entirely on SMTP communications with the “outside” world, while this new server will focus on handling client mailbox requests.
I’m a ways off yet from getting Exchange running – this new hardware didn’t even come with Windows installed so I’m going to have to start pretty much from scratch. As I’ve been told, the logical drives have been configured in the PERC (PowerEdge Raid Controller), but that’s about it. I ordered the Remote Access Controller, but I’ve never used that before and I have no documentation on it so I’m trying to figure out how to get that to work.
Oh, and to make things more interesting, this server does not come with a PS/2 input for older keyboards – just USB. I’m not surprised by this, but all our servers are on IOGEAR MiniView ULTRA 8 Port PS/2 KVM Switches. I’m frustrated that a basic – not to mention low-cost – piece of technology gets phased out and now I’m stuck supporting two different classes of human interface device. And it’s going to be that way for a while. I’m not upgrading these KVM switches for a while – I just bought the last one less than a year ago!
%@$#!
More to come…
QuantumTom 