Saturday 16 May 2009

SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 Mailbox Migration Time

Here is the mailbox move result for the SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 migration we are working on this weekend:

image

The time of a little over 55 minutes was for a source information store of about 2.5GB. Public folders were not in use on the source SBS 2003 server.

SBS 2003 source server configuration:

  • Intel Pentium D 3.0GHz.
  • 3GB ECC RAM.
  • Intel Server Board.
  • 300GB onboard RAID 1 array.
  • Intel SC5290BRP Chassis
  • Box age: Approximately 3.5-4 years (we put it in).
  • OS: SBS 2003 Premium RTM with SBS SP1.
    • Win2K3 SP2
    • Exchange SP2
    • WSS v2 SP1
    • WSUS v2 (v3 kept failing on install so we left it till now)
  • Users: 8
    • Mailboxes over 500MB: 2
    • Mailboxes over 250MB: 4
    • Mailboxes under 250MB: 2

SBS 2008 destination server configuration:

  • Intel Xeon X3370 3.0GHz Quad Core.
  • 8GB ECC RAM.
  • Intel S3210SHLX Server Board.
  • 950GB RAID 10 array with 3 partitions:
    • 175GB OS
    • 25GB Swap File
    • 750GB Network Data
  • Intel SRCSASBB8i PCI-E 8x RAID Controller (LSi).
  • Intel SC5299BRP Chassis
  • OS: SBS 2008 Premium

A D-Link WebSmart Gigabit switch provided the backbone for the process with both servers connected at full duplex Gigabit speeds with one NIC each.

Watching the process on the SBS 2003 source server in the Exchange snap-in showed that the newly created SBS 2008 domain admin account logging into each mailbox until all of them showed the domain account as being logged on.

Watching the process on the destination SBS 2008 server showed nothing while the above was going on beyond the scrolling progress bar. Once the SBS 2008 domain admin account was logged into all of the mailboxes, the transfer process started a few minutes later. But, it took a good 15-20 minutes of waiting before things started to move!

Look to much longer mailbox move times if there are more users. Especially if there is a larger number of users with mailboxes over 1GB in size.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

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