Moving users from ev8 sp4 + ex2003 to ev9 & ex2010

[EVMan]

Hi

Just wanted to get some advice / bes practices for the following :-

We currently have around 2500 active mailboxes in our ex 2003 environment with around 3500 archives (includes leavers archives).

We have a shiny new exchange 2010 environment. Due to the fact that we have lots of index errors, various errors and general sluggishness with our current ev8 sp4 setup we thought it'd be a good oppurtunity to use the mailbox migrations from 2003 to 2010 and also move to a clean EV 9 environment.

I was thinking of EV9 to be in a new EV site sat on physical servers rather than vm (our current ev environment is in vm and we have problems backing up in the backup window using netbackups ev agent). This new EV9 envionment would back off to new sql 2008 servers.

With EV8 SP4 we have the move archive feature which i thought we could utilise as the new EV servers would be in the same domain, however i've read that exporting the archive (in the ev8 site) to .pst and then importing the .pst once the user is on ex2010 and ev9 to a new archive maybe the best approach? Will the move archive create indexes upon move on the new ev9 site or will indexes be created when the user accesses archived mails?

Also if we were migrating the ex2003 mailbox then presumably we'd be migrating the shortcuts in the mailbox which would point at the ev8 site?

How would this work with a normal migration to a new EV site? Do you have to apply a policy to remove the shortcuts (stubs) to mailboxes based on an organisational unit in AD for example prior to a move? Or is it easier to push all archived mail back into ex2003 then move the mailbox to ex2010 before that archives items again based on new retention categories?

thanks

James

[FreKac2]

I guess one key piece of information is, what is the size of the archives ?

If it's really small then i might be "easier" to push it back to Exchange but most likely it's not.

I would if possible,

1. Fix the indexing issues

2. move the EV environment to the new EV server in using the data-only recovery steps from the admin guide + a bunch of tech notes

3. move the DB's to the new SQL 2008 server and reconfigure EV (again technotes).

4. Upgrade to EV9 and configure tasks for the Exchange 2010 servers.

5. Move users from the exch2003 server to the 2010 environment.

Depending on OS for the new EV server you may need to upgrade before the move e.g. Windows 2008 R2.

There are a bunch of steps for each step above but it will be a lot quicker than doing export/import. No need to setup the policies again, no need to worry about the shortcut's in the user mailboxes etc.

Unless you have a good knowledge about EV yourself, I would recommend using an EV consultant who have done it before.

/Fredrik

[EVMan]

Hi Fredrik

Thanks for the info. above.

On your recommendations above then after fixing the current indexing issues, should we upgrade our EV8 SP4 environment to EV9? Then bring in 2 x new EV9 servers into our current site? Then we can use these extra 2 x new EV9 servers to target exchange 2010?

Move the DB's to sql 2008?

If we brought in 2 x new EV9 servers into the exisiting site could we still do the data-recovery steps you mentioned, or would this not be required?

I think if we  used the exisiting site we wouldn't then have to change shortcuts etc?

thanks

[WiTSend]

The move archive utility is designed to move individual archives between EV sites.  It it not particularily suited for migrations of large numbers (or volume) of archives.  Resolving the outstanding issues and upgrading (as mentioned above) is the best process.  If you going to use the migrate to a new environment method then there are 3rd party migration tools (i.e. TransVault) that are much better suited for a large data migration. 

Also, as mentioned above, it is highly recommended that you engage a professional EV consulting group to do a Health Check, remediation of existing issues and migration.  Having professional consulting will significantly improve you chance for a positive outcome plus greatly reduce your stress levels.

[EVMan]

Hi Again

Second thoughts i think we will look at migrating to a new EV site (EV9 servers). We will do this by pushing users archives back into exchange 2003 as we have the storage to cope with this. Then once the mailboxes have been migrated to ex2010 they will be targetted by a new set of ev servers with new retentions etc. I assume 2 x EV sites can co-exisit in the same domain. ev8 site targets exchange 2003 and ev9 site will target exchange 2010 (although they are in the same exchange org)

This should proive to be more cleaner and not result in shortcuts pointing at our current EV8 site. I will read through the EV9 guides but would you recommend still having a 5-10Gb partition purely for the msmq's?

[FreKac2]

It will depend on how you want the end result to look like.

If I'm reading your first post correctly you want to move the current EV servers from the VM-environment and move the users from the old Exchange 2003 to the new Exchange 2010 environment ?

If that is the case then why not move the EV servers out of the VM environment to the physical servers.

So you don't add more servers to the current configuration but moving the "content" of those servers to new servers.

Kind of difficult to explain in a few lines, so please have a look at the data-only recovery steps in the admin guide.

You also need to make sure that the data, so partitions and indexes are accessible on the new servers.

Depending on how it's configured today it could be a quick operation (detach/attach the storage from one server to the other) or a slower copy operation.

Note: If you bring in two new servers into the site, they will be seen as two new servers, so if you don't need two additional EV servers then you don't need to add them to the site configuration.

It doesn't matter if you upgrade first to EV9 or "move" the servers first and then upgrade the servers, unless you use Windows 2008 R2 on the new servers, since there is no support unless you use EV9. Then you would upgrade first then "move" the servers.

If you use the configuration that you have already but moving the "content" of the servers to new servers, it wouldn't require you to do anything on the client side. So the same shortcut's can be used and they will work, they will access the data from the same location, except they are now on different servers.

But again, there is a bunch of parameters in doing this kind of move. So even though it's quick/er, it needs to be planned and you need to make sure that there isn't something in what you want to do that will negate this kind of move. On the top of my head, e.g. you want to move the users to a new Forest domain.

Edit: I would solve any issues you have with the current install first, before doing any of this.

/Fredrik