Migration Warriors: Large mailboxes cause hang time

By Staff report 28 Oct 2004 | SearchExchange.com

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A software platform migration can be a painful and expensive undertaking. Oftentimes, it's helpful to first take a look at what others have done to get an idea about what works -- and what doesn't.

Following is the story of one organization's Microsoft Exchange Server migration journey:

Migration Warrior: Nancy Gerth, supervisor of technology

More tales from the trenches Visit our collection of Exchange Migration Warrior articles.

Organization: Butler Technology and Career Development Schools, Fairfield Township, Ohio

Number of users/mailboxes: 360

Number of servers dedicated to messaging: 2

Current version of Exchange: Exchange 2003

Messaging system you migrated from: Exchange 2000

How long did the migration take? The actual migration took approximately one week, with an additional four months of time for planning, hardware acquisition and completion of "punch list" items.

Describe the migration: Two people were involved from the contract team, and one person was involved part time from our organization.

What's your story? Do you have an Exchange migration story you'd like to share with your IT peers?   If so, send an e-mail to Senior Editor John Hogan.

The migration of the data took three attempts. Because we have no limits on mailbox size, large mailboxes caused the migration to hang and be restarted. One set of mailbox data was lost due to corrupt files being saved within the mail account. We also complicated the migration by switching to a clustered server system with RAID drive enclosure during the migration.

The migration was contracted to Tri-State Computer Exchange (TSCE.com). The server cluster and RAID enclosure were assembled and configured, then delivered and installed to our site. When the migration commenced, it failed twice due to failed network speed -- there was too much data being transferred. The third time, the Exchange 2000 data was backed up to a NAS, and the data was restored to the new Exchange 2003 server cluster successfully.

Main problems: 1. Large file sizes in the data stores prevented a regular migration. 2. The cluster environment is more complicated.

Successes: User information was migrated successfully.

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