SynchInMigrationMode 2 Create new Archive and link to old

[Trafford]

A customer with ~20,000 mbx,  has a major project to migrate Exchange 2010 to 2013, upgrade EV from 9 to 10 for Exch2013 compatibility, and migrate the 6 server EV farm to fresh hardware.

As part of this exercise we would like to re-organise the vaultstores (For several techincal and historical reasons). The business is happy to leave existing data in the old vault stores, keeping them forever, for reference only, while linking the users to new Vault Stores as they migrate to Exchange 2013.

After much investigation of SynchInMigrationMode, including Tech48928, HowTo32318, Tech65019 it looked like SynchInMigrationMode 2 would do the job.

They have no shortcuts, and do not use Vault Cache at this point, although they would like to enable that for laptop users in the future.

From the above research we expected that EV with SIMM2 enabled, would detect the newly migrated Mailbox in Exch2013, create a NEW Archive, which would point to the NEW Vault stores (Defined with the Vault Store Override on the newly created Exchange 2013 objects in the EVAC); rename the old archive by adding date-time stamps to indicate opening and closing dates of the archive (Like Move Archive does); and finally link the old archive to the user.

We expected that the user would see two Archives, the OLD, renamed, one and his NEW one for Exchange 2013.

We expected to see the two ARchives in the EVAC, with the appropriate Vautl Store allocation listed for each.

The Exchange 2013 Is up, EV is Upgraded to EV10.0.4-chf3, Exchange 2013 & the new Vaultstore configureation is in place in EV

When we came to test this it did not work. No matter what we do it appears that SynchInMigrationMode 1 has happened and the NEW Exch 2013 Mailbox is inked to the OLD Archive, and mail is archived from Exchange 2013 to the OLD Archives.

I can find no further information on SIMM 2 other than :-

2 - Creates new entries for the new or moved mailboxes and renames any old
entries that have matching legacyMbxDN values, by adding timestamps to the
legacyMbxDN fields.

Has anyone used Mode 2 successfully for anything, or have any idea what it is supposed to be used for?

Further:-

In testing we have nearly achieved our objective by manually performing the following:-

Delete the entry from the EV DIrectory ExchangeMbxEntry table;

ZAP the mailbox; 

Migrate the Mailbox to Exchange 2013

EV (Simm2 set) Provisioning and Synch run on schedule

New Achive is provisioned, pointing to the New Vault Stores

Old Archive is linked to user (But not renamed automatically, we did that manually in the EVAC)

User sees and can operate on the two Archives

EVAC shows the two Archives linked to the Old and New VaultStores respectively.

So with a bit of help EV was capable of achieving the objective, and we know that it can re-name & date stamp Archives like it does with MOVE archive.

Obviously this approach would need some scripting to be used at scale, but we are so close and can't help thinking there is some little thing we are missing with this Synch in Migration Mode.

Has anyone attempted anything like this, or better yet succeeded?

[AndrewB]

there's been a lot of debate about this in various threads. some agreeing with the technote, some setting the key as best practice, some not paying attention until too late and undesired results were achieved. just as a matter of interest, have you tried setting it to 1 to see if you get the desired result for your situation?

[JesusWept3]

I'm confused as to why you'd actually want duplicate archives?

[AndrewB]

sounds like they want to redistribute the archives across vault stores without having to actually move them or go through a migration by leaving the old data in place and writing new data somewhere else

[Trafford]

Firstly, yes we did try Setting Mode 1 and that works perfectly.

Trouble is, setting 2 does exactly that same as setting 1 as far as we have been able to establish.

Secondly AndrewB has it spot on.

We want to move to a new Vault Store and Archive relationship, WITHOUT physically migrating 20,000 archives and 40TB of data. Those migration tools (Transvault, Archive Shuttle etc) are stupefiyingly expensive and completely beyond budget. We are quite happy to leave the old archives & vault stores to rot away in a corner for ever, as long as the user can access them if they really want to. We only archive after 1 year anyway so the archives are rarely accessed at best.

So from our experience there is no difference between Mode 1 & 2 so that begs the question :-

What is mode 2 for? How is it supposed to work? And under what circumstances is it intended to be used?