Migration on Evan Hoffman

Migrating a PostgreSQL DB to a new machine without doing a dump & restore

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 14:39:16 +0000

rsync over NFS can be so fast.

Exchange 2010 Post-Upgrade weirdness: can't edit Mail Non-Universal Group or Security Group

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 22:29:38 +0000

Now that everyone’s been moved to Exchange 2010 we’ve started using the 2010 Exchange Managment Console/Shell exclusively which has revealed some weirdness. First, we created a new group in AD using an old script (which used LDAP) and created a Mail-enabled Global Security group. We put people in the group, and everything seemed to be working fine until it was discovered that users in the group couldn’t see the group in the Global Address List. Users not in the group had no problem seeing the group. Additionally, users in the group couldn’t see users added directly in 2010. This only appeared to affect the GAL; the users were able to send/receive email fine with the full SMTP addresses.

Exchange 2010 Post-Upgrade weirdness: can't edit Mail Non-Universal Group or Security Group

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 22:29:38 +0000

vCenter Data Migration tool doesn't restore SQL Express DB - Migrating vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 (part 2)

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:44:01 +0000

I’m into my second day on this project. It appears that the backup and restore procedures run to completion but on the target machine the database is empty. This is pretty easy to check; I just went in with SQL Management Studio, looked in VIM_VCDB -> Tables -> dbo.VPX_DATASTORE and did “Open Table.” On the source machine I saw all the datastores in there (as expected). On the target machine, however, the table was empty. I found KB 1024380 describing a failure of the migration tool with a symptom, “Data Migration Tool logs (restore.log) does not indicate any errors, but the database is blank.” The KB says:

vCenter Data Migration tool doesn't restore SQL Express DB - Migrating vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 (part 2)

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:44:01 +0000

Migrating vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 (part 1)

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 22:28:12 +0000

When vSphere 4.1 was released earlier this year, I was mildly excited. Our ESX servers are still running 4.0.0 and I had been planning to upgrade to 4.0u1 for a while. When 4.1 came out it seemed to have vindicated my procrastination: now I could just upgrade to 4.1 and take advantage of whatever new features there were (I read something about memory compression… whatever). I assumed the upgrade procedure for vCenter itself would be pretty simple: uninstall 4.0 and install 4.1. Well, it turns out that’s not the case! I sat down one day to create my game plan for the upgrade and right away I learned this was going to be a lot more work than I’d guessed. From VMware’s KB:

Finally, all users moved from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010.

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:29:44 +0000

I’ve been working on migrating our Exchange environment from 2003 to 2010 for several months. My first post about this is from April 14th, when I was just trying to virtualize our existing Exchange 2003 system. Once that was complete, I started playing around with Exchange 2010 around June or July, and had most of the users moved over to 2010 by the end of August. The last holdouts were Blackberry users. I couldn’t move their mailboxes because our BES was hosted on our original Exchange 2003 server.

The Joy of Migrating from Exchange 2003 to 2010

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:57:13 +0000

I’ve been working on migrating from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 for several weeks. Actually, at this point it feels like several months. Now that I think about it, I guess that’s because it’s actually been several months.

Back in January or February, I got fed up with the Exchange setup I inherited: our Exchange 2003 server was running on a server in the basement of our office, on non-UPS power, with a power company that likes to pull shenanigans (like 3-4 hour outages every few months). In addition, the physical machine itself has some weird bug where it would hang at the POST screen complaining about some USB device, even though there are no USB devices plugged in, and USB is disabled in the BIOS. Meanwhile, in the datacenter, I had recently finished migrating most of our ancient physical servers to virtual machines on beautiful new hardware. It didn’t take long to see the solution that seemed to be obvious: move Exchange to the datacenter, in a VM.