Moving mailboxes from Exchange 2007 > 2010 is slow

[gshaw]

I'm moving our training install of Exchange (only used for sending emails between Outlook clients) from physical 2007 to a VMWare virtual machine on 2010. Installation and patches went through easily enough (SP2 UR3). Moved OAB, set new Send connector etc, now moving mailboxes.

 

I fired off the local move request on about 200 mailboxes (database size under 1GB ) so when the dialog box showed success I thought that was that. Refreshed the Mailboxes pane and noticed the majority were still showing as being on the old databases... then spotted the Move Requests menu option.

 

Looking in there I can see progress is being made, although rather slowly. Empty mailboxes take about 3-5 minutes to move although I've just seen one saying 23 minutes?!

 

Is it meant to be this slow or is something a bit wrong? The VM is in a pool with 10 SAS 15k disks and VMWare isn't showing heavy disk writes or latency (around 50-100 IOPS max). We're scheduling our proper Exchange server to move during Autumn so this has been useful to catch any potential issues early on as staff mailboxes are a lot larger than these training ones!

[SYNACK]

Hmm, have not done 2007 to 2010 but have done 2003 to 2010 and 2010 to 2010. Both of these were on junk hardware and went through much quicker. The thing to take into account is that the mailbox move system is different now and does a live migration of the mailbox so that the mailboxes remain accessable through the whole thing. This makes it take a bit longer but actually makes migrations easier as long as both servers are up. Because of the different database structures it has to build it item by item so it does still take its time but it still only took 6-8 hours for 7gb of files. Make sure you have stacks of space on the drives as the transaction logs stack up quickly. Oh and the live migration only works from 2007 up, 2003 takes each mailbox offline while its moved.

[sukh]

Fyi online moves are only supported when exch 2007 has sp3 deployed however worked fine with sp2 though its not supported anymore. As for the move check the move history for the mailboxes however its mozt likey the throttling policy is kicking in. Be careful when changing these settings, make a backup of the config file.

 

Throttling the Mailbox Replication Service: Exchange 2010 Help

[gshaw]

They've all completed now, looking a bit closer at the log the initial stat for time is a bit misleading. Turns out most of the time spent for the long winded ones is being stuck in a queue, the actual move process took about 3 minutes for each mailbox (sizes of only a couple of MB, quite a few only in KB)

[Watto]

If I may add my two cents, online migration solutions, like MigrationWiz - Complete cloud-based mailbox migration solution for instance, provide good performances and are able to migrate complete mailboxes (emails, calendars, contacts, tasks).