migrationwiz.com - thoughts & pointers

Preface: No, they have not solicited me.

This was one of the recommended migration tools for SMB moving on-prem Exchange into Office 365.  I wanted to move one of my clients (3 mailboxes) into O365 for the simple reason that SBS2011 was a clunky beast and the thought of maintaining reliable backups for years to come was becoming something of a bogeyman to me.  Email is the only real SBS function they used (remote access portal, too), and they were needing new hardware and Office licensing...so O365 was a no-brainer.

Back to the tool...this is probably one of the best admin tools out there - the troubleshooting aids they give you are second to none.  No more 'oh, sorry, it failed' messages with no real indication what went wrong.  They give you a list of steps to try to fix likely issues, a list to go through PRIOR to migrating, and if all else fails a direct email submission to support with a raft of dropdown boxes and info fields.

Check these help articles (linked directly next to the 'failed' message):

So good.


There are some items that are sort of clear...but not really.  If you have at least the below, you'll be golden.

  1. Create the users in O365.
  2. Assign them valid Office 365 licensing.
  3. Log in and update passwords/timezone settings for all the users you're migrating.
  4. Pick an account to use as the 'on-prem admin account' - I just used domain\administrator to keep things simple.  THIS ACCOUNT MUST HAVE A MAILBOX.
  5. Grant the account full access rights to the mailboxen you want to move.
  6. You can verify this by logging on to OWA as admin, opening their mailboxes.
  7. You should still wait an hour at least. (their troubleshooting suggested two)
  8. Cut over the MX while you're waiting.  I did the manual DNS because I'm not quite ready to hand over all the keys yet.  Also reminded myself why I dislike Network Solutions.
  9. You do the MX cutover by logging in to O365 as the admin, running through the email setup wizard.  It only takes 45 minutes because you have a lot of waiting on DNS propagation.
  10. Purchase your MigWiz licensing if you haven't already.
  11. Reconfigure your MigWiz connector to account for the new admin username (i.e. changing from user.name@onmicrosoft.com to user.name@domain.com).  You will get timeouts and failures if you forget this step.
  12. Start a migration, it'll take 10-15 minutes to get going (until you see a progress bar).  Once you see that, things are good to go - add the rest of the accounts.
  13. Note that if you add them all at once, you could overwhelm the on-prem internet connection.  IIRC 5 is the recommended maximum simultaneous migrations or something.  Check on this.
That's about it...the three accounts added up to ~8GB.  Looks like it'll take a good 24 hours.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning through failure - a keyboard creation journey

Image
tl;dr Built a custom keyboard cuz I have weirdo nerve pain issues.   Learned a lot cuz I failed a lot.   Maybe 'do it right the first time' is a bad frame of mind.   The keyboard ended up being kinda nifty.   It has lights, and a trackball, and QMK, and it helps my issues.   \o/ ( tl;dr is internet lingo that means, too long; didn't read ) Pain as a key ingredient An old proverb says, 'necessity is the mother of invention', and that is how this story begins. Over the last few years, age or stress or something has caught up with me and I developed the need to change my human-to-computer interface.  Mousing changed to trackballing.  The traditional keyboard was swapped out for an ergonomic, and then split keyboard.  Complicated multi-finger-and-hand key combinations were replaced by single keypress macros.  And yet more was still needed. It's often said that change only happens with pain - indeed, the organizations many...
Read more

Learning Opportunities - Watching/listening list

Over the last year I've spent a lot of time learning (thank you, long commute & lunch hours).  Many topics ranging from Chef to DevOps to architecture concepts to management concepts and everything in between.  Why have I done this? DevOps Demystified with Ben Rockwood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5E--QSBVBY DevOps at ancestry.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF5ya0q53kk Those two presentations were key in sending me down this road.  First, and most important, was Mr. Rockwood's explanation as to the real 'why', and the point behind DevOps from an operational perspective.  Second, and no less important but for a different reason, the continuous delivery system at ancestry.com really made it real to me because they are a 'Windows shop'.  So much of what I'd been reading about Chef/config mgmt. relied on amazing tools (see the error there?) only available to the Linux world.  Suddenly here's this guy telling me that it's possible...
Read more

DFSR - eventid 4312 - replication just won't work

This warning isn't documented that well on the googles, so here's some google fodder: You are trying to set up replication for a DFS folder (no existing replication) Source server is 2008R2, 'branch office' server is 2012R2 (I'm moving all our infra to 2012R2) You have no issues getting replication configured You see the DFSR folders get created on the other end, but nothing stages Finally you get EventID 4312: The DFS Replication service failed to get folder information when walking the file system on a journal wrap or loss recovery due to repeated sharing violations encountered on a folder. The service cannot replicate the folder and files in that folder until the sharing violation is resolved.    Additional Information:  Folder: F:\Users$\user.name\Desktop\Random Folder Name\  Replicated Folder Root: F:\Users$  File ID: {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}-v0  Replicated Folder Name: Users  Replicated Folder ID: 33F0449D...
Read more