[AusNOG] [AUSNOG] o365 experience

Tue Jun 19 12:46:16 EST 2018

The migration effort itself can be staged so you can sync 95% of the mailboxes within a batch prior to cutover, then go in and complete the migration batch at a later date, which copies the remaining 5% + delta of changes since the previous sync. We found the biggest problem to be large mailboxes (>10GB) where the 5%/delta exceeded 500MB, meaning the cutover run all night or even into the next day.

Microsoft’s FastTrak service isn’t too bad, it’s really aimed at getting a pilot operational before they hand you off to partner to do the rest of the work, or set you up to do it yourself.

Another gotcha; Microsoft also throttles the inbound migration, so you can only do so much per hour. You can tweak this by changing the number of concurrent migrations, and in some cases Microsoft will increase the limit for you (example: if you have a Premier support contract)

From: AusNOG <ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net> on behalf of Brenden Cruikshank <brenden at cruikshank.com.au>
Date: Tuesday, 19 June 2018 at 12:38 pm
To: James Deck <jdeck at 1300webpro.com.au>, "AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net" <ausnog at lists.ausnog.net>
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] [AUSNOG] o365 experience

Paul,

Tell us about your existing environment (Exchange 2010/2013/2016)? Whats your uplink speed? The number of mailboxes? Total mailbox size?

I had Exchange 2010, 50mb uplink and 3Tb of mail to migrate, it was stressful as this link was also our internet WAN link too.

In the end, I migrated 200 users with Microsoft fast-track support and we had a successful migration project and decommissioned the 2010 environment and our netbox blue spam appliance.

We are only using Exchange Online and OneDrive for Business and its great; I no longer need to manage exchange and deal with the frequent outages we had on the 2010 setup I inherited.

It requires lots of planning as I don't think users were ever deleted before I started.

We had an Optus "managed" network we found Optus aggressively traffic shaping Office 365 which caused Outlook to lock up continuously and it was a very poor end-user experience until we put in faster links (with another ISP).

We have a hybrid configuration so we still use an Exchange 2016 VM to manage users, You should be matched your UPN to your SMTP address, we had to rename 200 users to firstname.lastname which wasn't fun but that's a part of planning your migration.

The only thing missing with Office 365 is the basic spam and virus protection/security is pretty poor. So we're looking at deploying a cloud email security service next FY.

Cheers
Brenden

On 19 June 2018 at 11:10, James Deck <jdeck at 1300webpro.com.au<mailto:jdeck at 1300webpro.com.au>> wrote:
We’ve had a lot of success, once the nuances were learned. Things that were tricky the first time around, but are okay once you get the hang of it:

- AD sync
- managing the users after AD sync is in place (having to edit the actual ADSI attributes is a bit strange)
- importing PST files into Online Archive (requires uploading to Azure blob storage via PowerShell)
- having different email addresses and logins (eg. jdeck at 1300webpro.com.au<mailto:jdeck at 1300webpro.com.au> as my login and deck as my AD login --> deck at 1300webpro.com.au<mailto:deck at 1300webpro.com.au> as my UPN)

Certainly, when you have weirdness and have to contact China it is an absolute nightmare. We have one at the moment where a user’s outgoing mail (external senders only) get stuck in the Outbox in Outlook for a period of time. The support person’s “resolution” was to use OWA.

On the whole, I would rate the experience of post-migration users as superior to on-prem (aside from when you have a “call China” problem). I am very much an on-prem person, so this assessment is saying something :)

Kind Regards, 

James Deck

Managing Director

1300 Web Pro

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From: AusNOG <ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net<mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net>> on behalf of Paul Wilkins <paulwilkins369 at gmail.com<mailto:paulwilkins369 at gmail.com>>
Date: Tuesday, 19 June 2018 at 11:04 am
To: "AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net<mailto:AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net>" <ausnog at lists.ausnog.net<mailto:ausnog at lists.ausnog.net>>
Subject: [AusNOG] [AUSNOG] o365 experience

I'd be interested to hear general opinions and lessons learned from o365 migrations. So far as I've seen, the architecture (network and services) is complex, and user experience can never equal local Exchange.

So much so it leaves me wondering if the effort of migration can be justified? At the end of the day, you need a performant service, not finger pointing between networks and services, and blaming performance on insufficient network/proxy scale out.

Kind Regards

Paul Wilkins

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