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Echange 5.5 Server – Migration to another site

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We currently have 4 Exchange servers (version 5.5 to keep), 3 are member of the same site, but the last one, for historical reasons, belongs to another site.
The goal is to migrate the fourth one to the same site as the others without any impact on the users?community.
I have seen papers/documentation about a MS tool included in the Exchange Resource Kit that could do the migration.
For info, about 1000 mailboxes (database size: 120Gb) are defined on the server.

My questions are:
Does someone already successfully perform (with a comparable configuration) a migration using that tool ?
Is there any vital requirements ?
Is there any fallback solution once the process started ?
Any other tool that does the same job (transparent for the users) ?

Topic

The tools is OK – but be prepared

In reply to Echange 5.5 Server – Migration to another site

We used the tool on three different sites in two organisations. Amount of mail:20 GB. Number of users:250. It works fine.

We used two new PC’s as a temporary servers and extra sets of IDE disks. During different steps of the migration we made backup copies by copying the IDE disks (with the utility Ghost).In that way it was cheap to have temporary servers, and fallback was quick.

If you change the net bios name of the e-mail server, you have to change the e-mail profile on every PC. If not done via login script, this is time consuming. Test in advance on the temp server.

Good luck!

[Author]

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