Server Admins - Data migration
 

Question for the server guru's. I will be migrating from some 2003 file servers to a consolidated 2008 R2 cluster soon. Have roughly 9TB on one server and another 9TB on another. What would you suggest using to copy the data from the old servers to the new? Original servers will need to stay online and available during the process and I can't do an actual move.

I looked at the MS file server migration tool, but that takes the share offline while the copy is being done.

I could use robocopy, but it has been a while so I will need to brush up on the switches.

Last thought was to just do a tape backup/restore.


Anyone have any other tools or idea's?

robocopy works fine, beyond compare is good but there is a license cost. You don't say if the 9tb is SAN based, but given that your building a cluster it would appear that it is. Do you have any data replication tools offered by your SAN vendor?

Wont be san based. Just a moderate direct attached cluster. About as low end as you can imagine. This data doesn't have much throughput requirements other then needing to be HA.

The sad part is this new cluster and drives out performs our current SAN's.

I'm going to send you a PM.

Thanks

DFSR? Not sure it will handle all of that data well, but I have used it in the past with smaller platforms.

I was thinking DFS also.

Could do the first few shares, once the space looks right on both sides, change the new server to the primary target, then start the next few, then drop the secondary targets once the traffic dies down, etc.

It works pretty well on 2003+ machines, better on 2008 though.

I would also use DFS Replication along with Robocopy to preseed the data on the destination side.

Set up the Robocopy script to copy everything over and skip any files in use and not to retry on failures. Once the Robocopy script completes fire up DFSR and it will catch the rest. If the data doesn't change much you can skip the Robocopy step but DFSR will take a long time to finish it's first sweep and may not complete at all. DFSR will also duplicate all the permissions as long as you are not using local groups for permissions, and if you are now is a good time to stop.

This is very true, first setup of DFS when replicating is pretty slow. Doing a pre-seed would speed it up a ton.

I would be a good excuse to test your backup/restore process. Failing that, robocopy or rsync

Go find a copy of Microsoft RichCopy 4. Free, multithreaded and fast. We perform all kinds of storage migrations for our customers and RichCopy works well. Been using it before it was publicly available. Read about the Thread settings to tune best performance.

You guys are great. We thought about DFS but the inital copy was going to take took long. Going to look at Richcopy and start testing switches Scott gave me for Robocopy.

+1 It is what we used on a similar project.