MIGRATING VERY LARGE SITE

COLLECTIONS

Boris A. VelikovichDecember 7, 2013

About Me

Lead Developer/Architect Email: boris.velikovich@exostar.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bvelikovich/ Blog: http://kiwiboris.blogspot.com Twitter: @BVelikovich

Working for Exostar since 2007 Involved in A&D and pharmaceutical projects

About My Company

Leader in secure cloud-based solutions that improve collaboration, information sharing, and supply chain management for over 100,000 companies worldwide, including some of the largest players in aerospace and defense, life sciences, pharmaceuticals, and financial services.

Exostar’s solutions are accessed with our award winning Identity & Access Management services that enable speedy adoption of your trusted external partners.

Exostar’s ForumPass is a cloud-based, enterprise-class, collaboration platform that addresses the needs of users sharing sensitive data with external partners. The Cloud/SaaS “ready infrastructure” delivery provides real time scalability for 20-30 people collaborative teams or larger teams with 1,000s of users. The service is delivered on a per seat month basis which helps our customers avoid costly startup costs for a robust, secure service. 

ForumPass is built on the SharePoint platform, currently utilizing the SharePoint 2010 Enterprise version.

Introduction

Per Microsoft, there are about 9,000 medium-size businesses that have SharePoint data storages ranging from 2 TB to 100 TB

A lot of these storages eventually need to be migrated To a new version of SharePoint To a new location Etc.

By the time of migration, some of the site collections can grow quite large

The Problem

One of the ForumPass site collections is 8 TB This is twice as large as the recommended maximum

for any content database, and 81.92 times larger than the recommended maximum for a site collection

More than 30,000 users Content is added/modified very frequently

The farm is migrated to a new version of SharePoint

The maintenance window is only 4 days (96 hours) At least 99% of data must be preserved during the

migration The big question: How to migrate the 8TB site collection?

The Approach

Not feasible to migrate without splitting the site collection Copying would take much more time than the

maintenance window given Even if somehow it would be feasible to finish

the migration within the maintenance window, it would probably be wiser to find a long-term solution that would conform to the Microsoft best practices

None of the out-of-the-box methods offered by Microsoft is able to split a site collection

The Approach

We chose Metalogix Content Matrix as our migration software Allows read-only direct connection to the source

database - important for performance reasons Metalogix allows scripting migration activities

Provides PowerShell cmdlets Allows running several migration activities

simultaneously, thus speeding up the process Allows full and incremental copies

Important because incremental copies take less time than full copies – thus a final incremental copy is more likely than a full copy to fit into the maintenance window

Each script can take parameters

Prerequisites

The new

environment has to be fully functio

nal

• SharePoint farm installation• Web application configuration• Service application configuration• Firewalls configured• Etc.

Code has to

be migrat

ed

• Feature IDs need to be preserved• If migrating from MOSS 2007, code has to be compatible with SharePoint 2010

• In particular, code that refers to user profiles or search• All the solutions need to be deployed

PowerShell has

to be prepare

d

• Use Content Matrix PowerShell Console• Make sure your powershell.exe.config file contains the settings necessary to initialize

features

Site Restructuring

Each first-level subsite is promoted to a site collection

Some but not all second-level subsites are promoted to site collections

No other subsites are promoted to site collections (for complexity reasons)

The content of the top-level site of the site collection (libraries, lists, images, etc.) is NOT migrated

First-Level Subsites

•Create a new content database•In this content database, create a new site collection based on the standard template•Then, two options:•1) copy the content of the subsite to the top-level site of this new site collection•Since some second-level subsites are promoted to their own site collection, a site filter is required

•or•2) copy the subsite to this new site collection

For each first-level

subsite

First-Level Subsites

Copy-MLAllSharePointSiteContent orCopy-MLSharePointSite The specific parameters depend on the choice of

the cmdlet, as well as your migration requirements E.g., you don’t want to migrate themes if you are

migrating from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010 Make sure that the SiteFilterExpression is present

if you plan to promote certain subsites to their own site collections

Certain parameters might affect performance Sometimes it is worth to prototype the migration

operation in the GUI

Which Cmdlet to Use?

Use Copy-MLAllSharePointSiteContent when The URL of the new site collection has to stay

exactly the same as in the first-level subsite, or

You want the first-level subsite content on the root level of the newly-created site collection, and the site template of that subsite does not interfere with the site template of the root subsite

In all other cases, use Copy-MLSharePointSite

Configuration

1) Input CSV files

2) Exclusion CSV file

3) Script configuration

Input CSV files

At the very least, it should include: Server-relative source url

E.g., /sites/mycompany/SomeCoolSite Managed path

E.g., /customers/ or /sites/mycompany Site Name

E.g., SomeCoolSite Site Description

E.g., Some Cool Site Whether migration is full or incremental

Exclusion CSV File

At the very least, it should contain the site-collection-relative URLs of excluded subsites

Script Configuration

• Input CSV file path• Exclusion CSV file path• Source information

• DB Server, content DB, root URL, template path, etc.

• Target information• DB Server, farm

administrator, root url• Metalogix job history path

Should contai

n:

Demo

Second-Level Subsites

Some second-level subsites are promoted to site collections

These site collections’ URLs are new A separate script is needed Script configuration similar to what we’ve seen Input CSV should include the URL of the new site

collection, as well as the web template of the site copied

The Copy-MLSharePointSite cmdlet is used in the script

New site collections are created in new content databases

Demo

Team Sites

Be careful with Team Sites -MergeSiteFeatures parameter

If it is true and you migrate from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010, then the web parts from default.aspx will move to SitePages/Home.aspx and default.aspx will be empty - causes great confusion for users

If it is false and you used the Copy-MLAllSharePointContent cmdlet, you need to make sure that all necessary site collection features are activated

Workflows

Full copy: Workflow associations are copied, workflow instances are NOT

Possible to copy Nintex or SharePoint Designer workflow associations

Incremental copy: Workflow associations are NOT copied

Thus, the users should NOT create new workflow associations after the full copy ran

LegacyWorkflows feature needs to be activated on newly-created site collections

Post-Migration

Make sure you add site collection admins to the newly-created site collections

Involve users (CFT) Their feedback will identify the problem areas Run incremental migrations as needed

We needed several incremental migrations, plus a final one to be run during the maintenance window

Reports & Logs

Metalogix allows comparison reports to verify completeness of the migration job

Also, Metalogix provides logs for each job When your testers identify a migration

issue, the reports and logs will help you troubleshoot Sometimes, an additional incremental copy

might be needed

Migration Performance

The hardest thing to troubleshoot Migrating a 8 TB site collection may well take more than 1024

times than migrating a 8 GB site collection Migration rate can go down with time

C:\Users\SomeUser\AppData\Roaming\Metalogix\Content Matrix Console – SharePoint Edition\ApplicationSettings.xml PerActionResourceUse - Controls how many migration activities

are run in parallel Trade-off - Higher value means more parallelism but less

predictability Since parallelism is available where possible, the variance of load

within a job is less predictable. SQLQueryTimeoutTime – You can also lose data if the timeout

time is too low Disable verbose logging

Our Results

Accomplished a 96-hour go-live event Migrated more than three million

documents Achieved 99.6% quality metric with

customer concurrence Achieved major improvements in

Metalogix Content Matrix migration tool, in direct collaboration with Metalogix

Summary

Migrating a very large site collection: Typically involves splits, which means that a

third-party product such as Metalogix Content Matrix will be needed

Can be scripted, with scripts running in parallel

Requires comparison reports to ensure completeness

Presents performance challenges as the migration rate tends to go down

Questions?