EV merge two sites

[geir_aasarmoen]

This is the situation:

1. Our customer has two different EV sites in their domain. One in Stavanger and one in Aberdeen.
2. EV site in Aberdeen is archiving from different Exchange servers which are located off-shore (oil platform rigs).
3. Bandwidth between EV server in Aberdeen and Exchange servers are through satellite, which means very poor. To most of the servers it is around 500 – 700 KB only. There is only one exchange server which has around 1 MB bandwidth.
4. EV site in Stavanger is archiving from other exchange servers in Stavanger.

Objectives:

1. Merge both EV sites to one in Stavanger.
2. Customer wants to keep their Exchange serves as they are. They don’t want to move mailboxes to the Exchange servers that are already been archived by EV server in Stavanger.

I have tried:

1. To use move mailbox wizard to move archives between sites (in the same domain). This requires to disable mailbox before using move archive wizard.

Questions:

1. What is the best practice when it comes to merging two EV site that exist inside same domain?
2. How to make sure that customer can add those Exchange targets in Aberdeen to EV server in Stavanger… to make sure that archiving keeps on working after merging?
3. How to make sure that all the shortcuts already created on Aberdeen Exchange server can point towards their archives in Stavanger after the merge?
4. What steps should be done in which order to make this merger as streamlined as possible?
5. Maybe there are other things I have to keep in mind as well?

[GertjanA]

Hello Geir.

What is the version of EV? What the bandwidth between the EV-sites?

I see you tried 'move archive'. An inter-site move using 'move archive' should be sufficient.

Are the Exchange servers in 1 site?

If they are, you can remove them from Aberdeen as target, and add them to Stavanger as target.

What you might do (but that depends on the size of the archives, bandwidth etc.) is disable everyone in aberdeen exchange for archiving, export all archives back into exchange, add aberdeen exchange-servers to stavanger site, enable everyone in aberdeen for archiving in stavanger (provisioning etc), then have them get NEW archives in stavanger.

Or, export all aberdeen archives to pst's, copy them to stavanger, import pst's into archives.

Obviously, you should remove the shortcuts (if you use these) from the aberdeen mailboxes before re-archiving. (otherwise you get double shortcuts pointing to different archives)

Or (although you are a symantec employee ;-)) check Archive Shuttle from GlassHouse. There are some other tools also available.

There might be other options, but this is what comes into mind.

GJ

[Wayne_Humphrey]

Hi,

Take a look at Archive Shuttle - http://www.glasshouse.com/evtools/archive_shuttle  it will help you in the migration and should make it seamless ;)

[ATanous]

You may also want to take a look at Globanet's GEM product. http://www.globanet.com/gem

[TSO]

HI  geir_aasarmoen

I am not Sales Manager...but have used TransVault for similar projects in the past to Merge more than two sites into 1 for Enterprise Vault.

If you do not wish to use third party tool then your options are going to be move archive or  export/import of PST.

The third part tool mentioned above made the migration painless....