EV 10.0.3; FSA; Fileserver migration from 2003 to 2012

[Kai_Schröer]

Cheers!

Our customer want to migrate their fileserver from Win 2003 to a clustered Win 2012 incl. change of hardware.

The Hostname and IP will not be changed

They want to detached the NetApp LUN from the Server 2003 and want to attach them on the Windows 2012 server.

Should the Placeolder still work?

Every article is relating to recreate the placeholder, but we try to save this time.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Kind Regards

Kai

[AndrewB]

why are you fronting with a file server if the storage is netapp? EV has native integration and archives directly from netapp filers.

[Kai_Schröer]

Hi Andrew,

Good question, but it's not our design. There will be a reason in the past for the customer.

Now it's state of the art...

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Kai

[cruisen]

Hi kai,

what you are looking for was introduced with FSAutility and the -pm option in version 9.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/file-system-archiving-enterprise-vault-v9-placeholder-...

just quoting :  "now with the FSAUtility -pm option you no longer have to move the backend data.

So, providing source and destination file servers (and they can be disparate devices) are being managed by the same Enterprise Vault server you can use -pm for the migration. Here the time to complete will be determined by the number of placeholders on the volume not by the size of the archived files they point to. This will mean you have a highly performant placeholder migration tool. Often you have to do server migrations, volume re-organisations etc. in small maintenance time-windows. You now have the tools from us to help you succeed in those migrations.

best regards,

cruisen

[Kai_Schröer · Accepted solution]

Cheers.

A little bit late, but I had opened a request at support:

Me@Sym:

our customer want to migrate their fileserver from Win 2003 to a clustered Win 2012 incl. change of hardware.
The Hostname and IP will not be changed
They want to detached the NetApp LUN from the Server 2003 and want to attach them on the Windows 2012 server.
Should the Placeolder still work?
Every article is relating to recreate the placeholder, but we try to save this time.

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Sym@Me:

I understand from your case comments what you trying to do and it make logical sense but I believe it is not a supported method. The supported method is to use FSAutility and re-create the placholders, but I will research if there are any other option and let you know as soon as possible.

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Me@Sym:
thanks for the really fast response.
Unfortunately the customer need to make the upgrade this weekend, that's the reason for the priority.
He want to replace the server and want to keep the hostname and IP. In this way he cannot use fsautility.
I hope you will find anything.

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Sym@Me:
I have performed some investigation and we haven't ever tested your scenario. The logic behind mounting the LUN from the old to the new server should work as long as everything stays the same i.e. Servername, I.P., drive letters, shares, Mount points, Alternate Date Streams that FSA creates within the folder structure, time stamps on files and folders, etc... and nothing interferes with the data during the re-mount as EV relies on everything being the same.  Assuming the storage LUN would be based on a technology that would allow Windows systems to just detect and remount without having to create new disk signatures, and recreate the partitions.

With the above in mind, we strongly recommend that you fully test your migration on a lab environment before completing this on a production server to reduce the risk of having to restore all of your data from backup in the event of an issue. Once you have mounted the LUN on the new server in a test lab,  you should run the Archiving Task and monitor if new data can be processed successfully into the existing Archive. This would be a good way to determine if the file system is being accepted against the existing EV database references.

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Unfortunately the customer gave us no feedback, but I am sure he w9ould have come back if it's failed.