United States | Microsoft 365 Tenant Migration Planning:<br>Part 2 – Migration Workloads

Joseph Cirillo - 01.08.202220220801

Microsoft 365 Tenant Migration Planning:
Part 2 – Migration Workloads

United States | Microsoft 365 Tenant Migration Planning:<br>Part 2 – Migration Workloads

In Part 1 we presented some key performance indicators for a successful migration and identified a number of questions to ask when determining the end state architecture and migration plan. In this article we will explore best practices for managing the migration of data for each workload prior to the cutover (the go-live phase when a project is deployed in production).

WORKLOAD STRATEGIES

To ensure you set the proper expectation for what will be available at cutover, you must determine the migration approach and timing for each workload. You may expect the data to be available immediately on the destination tenant at cutover, however some data may be delayed due to service throttling, resource contention between workloads or overall volume of data to move.

Although you can make a request to Microsoft to remove EWS Throttling in Microsoft 365 to improve the migration performance to or from Exchange Online, Microsoft is currently throttling the SharePoint Online service during weekday daytime hours. It is important to note SharePoint throttling has a direct impact on other SharePoint-dependent workloads such as OneDrive, Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups. With the SharePoint limitation in place you will want to maximize the efficiency of your migration by determining what workloads can be run in parallel and what data should be prioritised.

NOTEMicrosoft provides the ‘General migration performance guidance’ article for SharePoint Online which states:   “Many Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft OneDrive customers run business-critical applications against the service which runs in the background. These include content migration, data loss prevention (DLP) and backup solutions. During these unprecedented times, we are taking steps to ensure the SharePoint and OneDrive services remain highly available and reliable for your users who depend on the service more than ever in remote work scenarios.   In support of this objective, we have implemented tighter throttling limits on background apps (migration, DLP and backup solutions) during weekday daytime hours. You should expect these apps will achieve very limited throughput during these times. However, during evening and weekend hours for the region, the service will be ready to process a significantly higher volume of requests from background apps.   Can Microsoft turn off the throttle to help me with migration? No. Throttling is in place to protect the reliability and availability of the service. Throttling rules cannot be disabled or suspended. Opening a support ticket will not lift the throttle.”

The following demonstrates some migration workload strategies:

  • Limit the number of objects per migration task. Migration tools have options for grouping objects into smaller batches.
  • Isolate objects with a very high volume of data into their own batch. For example, SharePoint sites with over 500 GB of data should be run individually.
  • Stagger the start of the migration batches for like-object types. For example, if you have five batches of mailboxes with each batch containing 100 mailboxes, start the first batch then wait until it is at least 25% processed before starting the next batch.
  • Perform the data copy in stages by date range. This will allow you to move most of the data before cutover making the cutover event occur quicker. For example, two months before cutover, synchronise all data older than 60 days. One month before cutover, synchronise all data older than 30 days. Two weeks before cutover, synchronise all data older than 5-15 days.
NOTEFor most migration tools data migration is a copy not a sync, so negative changes (files deleted or moved) after the initial sync will still appear in the destination after the final sync.   By moving the data in stages by date range you can minimise the risk of users having duplicated items.
NOTELeading up to the cutover a change freeze should be implemented (at least one week prior), limiting all changes such as creating new users, SharePoint sites, Teams or Teams channels, modifying permissions on objects, restructuring data, modifying group memberships, etc.
  • Initially you should only copy data from specific components within a given workload. For example, only copy data from the primary mailbox. Leave the Online Archive or Recoverable Items folder as a post-cutover migration activity.
  • Run non-conflicting workloads in parallel. For example, you can run a mailbox synchronisation task in parallel with a OneDrive synchronisation task since the migration endpoint for each service is different.
  • Do not run OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams or M365 Groups migrations at the same time. These workload migrations use the same migration API and share the same bandwidth limitations.
  • Monitor for throttling. You may need to spread your migration tasks further apart so the migrations have more time to complete.

The above techniques will provide you with efficient data synchronisation events and will shorten the duration of the cutover.

Next up is Part 3: Completing the Migration.

If you would like to take the hassle out of your Tenant to Tenant migration contact us.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUBMISSION!

United States | Microsoft 365 Tenant Migration Planning:<br>Part 2 – Migration Workloads

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United States | Microsoft 365 Tenant Migration Planning:<br>Part 2 – Migration Workloads

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