Migrating Unity to New AD Forest

[rhindle2k2]

Hi all,

I have a few basic questions about planning to migrate Unity 4.04 to a new forest. We have 7 Unity servers that will need to be migrated. The excellent Cisco Unity Deployment and Solutions Guide speaks pretty generically about this topic in Chapter 15: Upgrades and Migrations. In the section Migrating Unity Between Different Active Directory Forests it mentions Unity needing to be 'moved' to another AD forest, but doesn't really go into any more details than that other to be aware of a issues that could be introduced by the migration and a few other things.

A few questions I have are:

1. Does this this require a fresh install of Unity in the new forest and then use DiRT to restore? Seeing that we are planning to import all the user accounts with all the same alias's I'm guessing that should be ok if it is the proper procedure. As each site gets migrated the local Exchange and domain controllers are going to be decommissioned and mailboxes exported and deleted so I'll have to cut over immediately. We are running UM.

2. What happens if the OU structure is different in the new forest when doing a DiRT restore? Just wondering ahead of time if the structure needs to be the same as it is in the current forest and if not will their be problems and can those problems be fixed by reconfiguring Unity or would the subscribers have to be deleted and recreated.

3. Is there a basic document anywhere that discusses how to migrate Unity from one forest to another, or is it simply install a new Unity server in the new forest and restore with DiRT for each current site/server?

4. (somewhat unrelated) Does the AD schema update on the 4.04 CD work for AD 2003 as well? We will be migrating to a Windows 2003 forest will maintaining Win2k on the Unity servers themselves.

My guess is that the servers will need to be fresh installs and configured in the new forest and then run DiRT to restore assuming all the alias's are the same which they should be.

Thanks in advance for any tips and suggestions and links that you may have concerning this topic. ;)

Keith

[lindborg · Accepted solution]

The reconfiguration and upgrade guide covers this in some detail:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/customer/products/sw/voicesw/ps2237/products_upgrade_guides_book09186a0080222fdf.html

yes - you have to do a fresh install, do a DiRT backup of your old system and restore it to your new install. The versions need to match.

the OU structure doesn't matter - searches are made in AD from the top of the forrest down for a matching DirectoryID, RDN then alias (mail nickname) - this process is covered in the DiRT help file if you want specifics.

Yes - the schema update is the same for 2003.

[rhindle2k2]

Excellent. Thanks Jeff for the info and all the great work you've done and continue to do. ;)

Keith

[grepgrep]

Keith did you ever get a response to how to Migrating Unity Between Different Active Directory Forests.

If you did have you done so yet. Thanks for your help