Moving Unity subscribers - what is the best way?

[maratimer_2]

Unity 4.05 UM/E2k3 I need to move approximately 6,000 unity subscribers (2,000 users per server) to a different location but in the same dialing domain. I was planning to do a DIRT restore but was wondering if anyone has any experience using the GSM tool to move that many users at once (2,000)? Would this be a viable option that could be done in a day? It would really help me out /make things much easier if I could do this.

All comments/feedback appreciated.

[Tommer Catlin]

You can use the rule of thumbs as with Exchange mailboxes. I like to use a "pilot" group to start with. After hours, pic a number you are comfortable with to test. For your sake, 100 subscribers. Use the GSM tool and time how long it takes to move to the new server. My guess, you need to calculate bandwidth between the servers. If each user has 25megs of voicemails, and your bandwidth pipe is 4 megs, you can roughly say will take:

25*100 =2500megs /4 megs per second for bandwidth. So roughly 10 minutes to transfer.. (ya right... probably much longer, but this is why you test.) The two database have to read write, WAN overhead, etc... all comes into play.

Once you have a baseline from timing the 100 subscriber move, you can come up with a better window to give to rest of the 6000 users.

You will also need to run permission wizard to add in the new Exchange servers.

hope this helps.

[maratimer_2]

Thanks for your response. This is something I would like to consider. Unfortunately, our lab does not emulate all of the conditions of the WAN, AD and exchange mailbox size, so a realistic test can only be done in production. When using the GSM tool, if I wanted to keep the users configuration intact as it is today, would I select the defaults when moving during the GSM wizard? This is the one area I am not sure about as I would want the accounts to move AS IS..without any changes. Thinking about that, we would then need to move all of the CHs and other configuration which has been modified since this server went into production , which brings me back to the DIRT scenario. I think I have just realized what my real option is short of recreating the entire configuration on the new server. DIRT seems to be the way to go for what I am attempting to do.