Date: 24.09.12 B Information Services Office 365 Board Mail Migration Brief description of the paper This paper details the findings from the investigations undertaken regarding the migration of all student mail Action requested The board are requested to consider and advise regarding the mail migration strategy and appropriate migration toolset Resource implications Resource is in place to complete the mail migration. Risk Assessment Does the paper include a risk analysis? No Equality and Diversity Does the paper have equality and diversity implications? NO Originator of the paper This was originated by Andy Stewart resulting from the work undertaken by the project technical lead, John Mcfarlane Freedom of information Can this paper be included in open business? YES
Mail Migration Overview This paper will review the findings from the investigations undertaken regarding the migration of all student mail PGR Students o Analysis of mailbox quotas o Migration schedule and impact o Communication s Taught students o Analysis of mailbox quotas o Migration tools o Migration strategies, schedule and impact o Communications o Recommendations
PGR Student Migration Analysis of mailbox quotas A list of PGR s, who are due to start up to 1 st January 2013 has been supplied by Registry at the end of August and subsequently analysed with regards mailbox quotas and their prospective mail service. The initial analysis would indicate a total of 3,800 students with an accumulated mailbox size of 0.95 TB and are detailed as follows; Mail Service School Number Actual of Mailbox Size Students Rounded Mailbox Size Exchange D161 School of Law 110 15,394,154 14.7Gb Exchange D284 School of Economics 27 8,910,603 8.5Gb Exchange D722 School of Biomedical Sciences 140 39,998,592 38.1Gb Exchange D741 College of Science and Engineering 2 134,485 0.13Gb Exchange D780 Business School 102 14,511,558 13.9Gb Exchange D790 College of Humanities and Social Science 2 204,470 0.19Gb Exchange D791 Edinburgh College of Art 235 55,527,881 52.9Gb Exchange D845 College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine 86 1,376,733 1.3Gb Total for Exchange 704 136,058,476 129.7Gb Staffmail D151 School of Divinity 126 12,466,910 11.9Gb Staffmail D240 School of Chemistry 165 58,023,955 55.3Gb Staffmail D253 School of Mathematics 67 17,756,112 16.9Gb Staffmail D336 Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies 175 23,870,142 22.8Gb Staffmail D541 School of Biological Sciences 275 97,058,510 92.6Gb Staffmail D723 School of Clinical Sciences and Community Health 228 68,066,866 64.9Gb Staffmail D724 School of Molecular and Clinical Medicine 157 48,055,148 45.8Gb Staffmail D744 School of Physics and Astronomy 148 45,871,425 43.7Gb Staffmail D747 School of Informatics 230 76,880,157 73.3Gb Staffmail D748 School of Engineering 281 109,951,937 104.9Gb Staffmail D74B School of Geosciences 199 61,841,956 58.9Gb Staffmail D792 School of History, Classics and Archaeology 165 39,049,380 37.2Gb Staffmail D793 School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences 161 36,941,962 35.2Gb Staffmail D795 School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures 194 28,412,673 27.1Gb Staffmail D796 School of Health in Social Science 69 1,0187,102 9.7Gb Staffmail D809 School of Social and Political Science 314 71,689,606 68.4Gb Staffmail D819 Moray House School of Education 142 17,422,244 16.6Gb Total For StaffMail 3,096 823,546,085 785.4Gb Total 3,800 959,604,561 915.2Gb
Migration Schedule After consultation with the technical teams who will be managing the migration, the optimum time would appear to be w/c 29 th October; In an effort to stagger the migration and thus reduce load on the SMS service, it is envisaged that for those moving to Exchange, the migration will commence around Wednesday 31 st October, to complete the migration before the end of the week, whilst those moving to StaffMail, the migration will commence on Friday 2 nd November and be completed over the weekend. During the migration process, all incoming mail will be held at the mail relay; students should refrain where possible from accessing their email and not send any emails, as these may not be migrated if sent mail is actioned after the mailbox has been migrated. Once the migration process has been completed, the mail relay hold will be released to enable all incoming mail to be directed to the new mailbox Whilst is is acknowledged that the migration of PGR s is not on the critical path of the project, the advantage in completing this will greatly reduce both risk and traffic on the SMS system whilst any taught student migration is progressing Communications Having prepared a list of PGR s by school, communications to each of the specified schools will be undertaken in the coming week to ensure The identified mail system is correct for that school All the students have been identified The proposed schedule is acceptable All are aware of the schedule and the impact during migration
Taught Students Migration Analysis of mailbox quotas A list of taught students who are due to start up to 1 st January 2013 has been supplied by Registry at the end of August and subsequently analysed. The initial analysis of these details would indicate a total of 27,379 students with an accumulated mailbox size of 1.14 TB. It has been acknowledged that this list will not be the definitive list of taught students as late entrants are still being processed. As a result, Registry has agreed to provide an updated list later in the year, to enable comparisons to be made against the original list and new students identified. Migration Tools The project technical lead has explored three possible mail migration tools. Two of three have proved that mail can be migrated whilst it has not been possible to successfully migrate mail with the third. Combined with the fact the migration of taught student mail is a one-off process and the limited available project time to review potential migration tools, there does not appear to be any benefit in investigating further alternative migration tools. Whilst the early findings have been published in previous board papers, this section seeks to summarise all findings to-date to enable the project board sufficient information to determine the migration strategy for taught students. Option 1 Office 365 IMAP Utility As part of the evaluation the following observations were noted according to the tests carried out ; This IMAP utility is supplied free of charge by Microsoft The specified mailboxes were successfully migrated This facility provides the opportunity to continually synchronise SMS and Office 365 mailboxes, with new mail, deletions and mail item status changes (read / unread during the migration process, keeping the target mailbox up to-date, every 24 hours However, from an operational perspective, a number of concerns were raised with regards migrating a large number of mailboxes at the same time. These concerns would suggest that this solution is unsustainable according to the current project schedule for the following reasons; Only one batch could be run at any one time. In our environment this would require a single batch of approximately 27,000 mailboxes Due to the amount of mail to be migrated, there will be the requirement to commence the migration well in advance of Semester 2. There are serious concerns that the synchronisation process for 27,000 mailboxes could be completed on a daily basis for an elongated period without some failure It was not possible to re-apply a batch of mailboxes as previously migrated email was not recognised and so duplicated It was not possible to amend the contents of the batch as this effectively terminated the batch of the original mailboxes; by only migrating the mailboxes of the new additions to the
batch. As a result a second batch of new students (after the main batch had started) would have to be maintained and subsequently run on the completion of the first batch in mid- January Option 2 - Microsoft Transporter Suite This tool, designed primarily as an on-site migration tool has previously been used to migrate mail between different internal mail services, e.g. StaffMail to Exchange. In the tests undertaken as part of the project, it has not been able to authenticate to the Microsoft cloud services to-date, due primarily to the fact that the Office 365 domain does not reside on our Active Directory. The only way in which it was deemed that this tool could have been utilised would be to undertake a two-phase migration process, firstly migrating the taught student accounts into the on-site Exchange, then subsequently migrating the mailboxes from the on-site Exchange to the cloud based Exchange. Due to the amount of mail and the associated temporary storage that would be required, this was not deemed to be a practical solution Option 3 CloudMigrator As previously reported, this utility provided by a commercial organisation called Cloudsolutions, has to-date assisted with the migration of approximately 450,000 mailboxes to Office 365 and other cloud based mail systems. This has been used by other universities such as Dundee, Highlands and Islands, as well as larger higher education establishments such as Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (75,000 students and 16,000 staff). In addition, the solution was also suggested by Mark McManus (Microsoft). Further details can be viewed online at http://www.cloudmigrator365.com/ As part of the evaluation the following observations were noted The specified mailboxes were successfully migrated, with details noted in a detailed log It is possible to run multiple batches simultaneously over a number of workstations and so spread the load It is possible to re-start a batch, and previously migrated mail will not be duplicated It provides the ability to set actual date ranges for mail migration. This facility provides the added flexibility to control the mail migration over a period of time and thus reducing stress on the existing SMS infrastructure In addition, the following points should be noted Whilst it does not offer the option to subsequently synchronise mail, it is possible to run subsequent migrations without affecting the previously migrated mail (deletions excepted) It has not been possible to complete any extensive timing tests due to only having a 25 user license evaluation and the difficulty in getting access to large student mailboxes This is a commercial product and will result in license cost of 15,000. The supplier has advised that licence costs will be 1 per mailbox, payable only for the first 15,000 mailboxes with the remainder without charge
Migration strategies schedule and impact From the analysis undertaken, it is estimated that, at early September, the total mail to be migrated for taught students is approximately 1.4TB. There is still a great unknown with regards how long this migration will take as the migration process is dependent on a number of factors out with the control of the project, namely, network traffic / performance within the University and the availability of Microsoft to process transferred mail. As a result, there are a few options to consider; During any advance migrations, the students will continue to use SMS to send and receive mail. However, during the final switch over to Office 365, all incoming mail will be held at the mail relay; students should refrain where possible from accessing their email and not send any emails, as these may not be migrated if sent mail is actioned after the mailbox has been migrated. Once the migration process has been completed, the mail relay hold will be released to enable all incoming mail to be directed to the new mailbox Option 1 Initial Partial Mail Migration Based on the principle that the most recent mail is the most relevant in terms of access, this option would result in the most recent mail being used to partially populate the students Office 365 mailbox at the start of Semester 2, relating to mail from the start of December 2012. To achieve this, two migrations, in conjunction with communications would be required; Firstly, around mid-december, all mail from 1 st December up to that point would be migrated to Office 365. There would obviously be the need to monitor the migration rate carefully to ensure that current mail is present for the students at Semester 2 Secondly, during the first week in January, prior to the students returning, the remainder of the mail from the first cut-off point would be migrated At that point all incoming mail would be directed to the Office 365 account and all outgoing mail should be sent from Office 365 For mail prior to December, students would still have access to their SMS account The remaining mail would then be migrated over to Office 365 in a controlled manner The advantages of this option would be that the issue of maintaining synchronisation of recent mail would be largely removed. However, it has to be acknowledged that the required elapsed time to migrate mail will not be understood until mid-december Option 2 Full Mail Migration This option would endeavour to migrate all mail prior to the start of Semester 2. Mail migration would commence early November, after the completion of the PGR migrations Mail could be migrated on a year by year basis for all students. On the basis that the relevant migration progress is achieved, a final cut-off point would be established in mid December with all mail migrated up to that point. Subsequently, during the first week in January, prior to the students returning, the remainder of the mail from the first cut-off point would be migrated At that point all incoming mail would be directed to the Office 365 account and all outgoing mail should be sent from Office 365 Whilst not required, SMS would still be available for students to access historic mail
The advantages of this option is that the rate of progression to be understood at an earlier stage and decisions can then be taken to ensure that the most recent mail being migrated to Office 365 Communications Depending of the strategic decision taken to migrate the mail relating to taught students, there will be the requirement to advise on progress and impact to both the students and the various support teams, (i.e. IS Consultants, local computing officers college office and IS helpline ) Recommendation Based on the investigations carried out the recommendation to the project board would be to approve the CloudMigrator solution at a cost of 15,000 and that the project would commence the migration of taught student mail at the start of November and monitor progress