My Favorite Tool Against 7 Big File Migration Challenges
Certified Infrastructure and Cloud Services expert offers tips to enhance your file-based NAS and server migration experience.
Today, in this blog, I want to share some tips to help you simplify your migration activities.
I have been performing file-based migrations for well over 20 years, primarily with EMC Technology. The majority of migrations have been SMB-based including server-to-server, server-to-NAS, and NAS-to-NAS migrations.
Some migration tools that I have leveraged over the years include:
- ROBOCOPY
- EMCOPY
- RSYNC
- VNX Replicator
- Isi_vol_copy
One of the major considerations that we face when performing file-based migrations is which tool is the best for the job.
You will learn how to win the file migration war against these top 7 challenges:
- Challenge 1: Bandwidth Throttling. Customers may need to throttle the bandwidth that is consumed by the migration. This may limit the amount of concurrent sessions or the actual time required to stop the migration if necessary.
- Challenge 2: Detailed Reporting. Customers often ask to see a concise daily status report on all migration jobs. This include successes, failures, and the details surrounding both cases. Other tools do have log files associated with them, but it will take some tweaking to get an exact report. The ability to email a report, if supported, will typically require additional configuration effort.
- Challenge 3: Job Scheduling. Job scheduling needs to be done from the Windows scheduler at each server that is performing the migration job. The job schedules can overlap if multiple proxy servers are used for the migrations.
- Challenge 4: Estimating Switchover Time. This manual process includes reviewing the logs from each incremental run to estimate the time it takes to perform the incremental copy.
- Challenge 5: Creation of Migration Jobs. Job creation can be scripted, but needs to be imported on each server that will be performing the jobs and then scheduled per server. For Windows, a batch file needs to be created and then scheduled with the Windows scheduler.
- Challenge 6: Incremental Copies. All the tools mentioned have a way to perform incremental copies. Some need to perform a file compare and could take hours to find the one file that needs to be copied. Others will not synchronize the directories as per NDMP-based protocol.
- Challenge 7: Mix of SMB and NFS Clients. If a customer wants to copy NFS files as well as SMB files, then two tools will be required, such as RoboCopy and Rsync.