Symetrik Domino Consulting

Last week, I met with Microsoft regarding one of our sites that is not currently on Domino. We will call this Site A. We built 2 clustered Domino servers for that site in September of last year and put it on hold because we didn’t want to go through the labor/cost of migrating 300 existing Outlook clients to Lotus Notes if we were only going to migrate them back to Outlook a few months later.

We’ve been waiting on how the contract negotiations with Microsoft will go and then determine through the Microsoft design, planning, and scheduling to see how long it will take.

The problem is that this site relies on a 3rd party host provider. We have no guarantee of backups, no resolve if the company goes bankrupt, no compliancy capturing, and then the added cost of paying for the external service.

Their existing mail setup is Outlook 2003 or 2007 accessing POP3 mailboxes with local .pst files. The meeting was to determine how we should proceed in the next few weeks because the management at that site is now very concerned several months after we had planned on bringing this service in-house that data is not secure and protected.

I explained the issues to Microsoft and we came up with 4 options. We also have these assumptions: no webmail/Internet/BES access necessary, no compliancy capturing necessary, Any VIP users who need webmail/internet/BES can be migrated to a nearby site that uses Domino already.

1. Do nothing now. Wait until they rollout the global Exchange infrastructure and migrate the existing .pst mailboxes to global Exchange environment. Microsoft claims that it will only be approximately, 9 to 10 weeks before they can roll the global Exchange infrastructure out to Site A if they use Site A as one of the first sites. They do not have their schedule put together yet, but the first draft will be ready next week.
User Impact: None now, point Outlook to global Exchange later.
Pros: No user impact now, no labor costs/resources required now
Cons: Continued risk in using the external host provider, no mailbox backups

2. Build a separate AD domain, with temporary exchange environment. We will “cut off” the user’s existing mailboxes (local archive .pst files). We will build 2 virtualized AD domain controllers, 2 exchange 2007 servers, and High availability is provided by CCR (Continuous Cluster Replication). This will require either a 3rd server for the CCR, or a shared storage (SAN).
User Impact: Point Outlook to new exchange server now, point Outlook to global Exchange later.
Pros: Mailbox Backup
Cons: User will have two local archive .pst archive files after migration to global Exchange environment, slow setup, requires either 3rd server or SAN, We must touch desktop now, and later.

3. Build a separate AD domain, with temporary exchange environment. We will “cut off” the user’s existing mailboxes (local archive .pst files). We will build 2 virtualized AD servers, 2 Exchange 2003 stand alone servers, with no high availability (without CCR).
User Impact: Point Outlook to new exchange server now, point Outlook to global Exchange later.
Pros: Mailbox Backup, Quick setup.
Cons: User will have two local archive .pst archive files after migration to global Exchange environment, We must touch desktop now, and later.

4. Turn on the Domino servers we previously built and and turn on the POP3 task.
User Impact: Point Outlook to new POP3 server now, point Outlook to global Exchange later.
Pros: Brings the existing hosted servers in house so we don’t have to rely on hosted provider, clients can be configured to leave mail on server so mail can be backed up, servers are already built so there is a fast turn around, can use the existing .pst file, Mailbox Backup.
Cons: We must touch desktop now, and later.

With options 1 and 4, we can migrate the local .pst file to the exchange mail box in the future (limit 2GB), or it can remain on local drive as an archive.
With options 2 and 3, we must download data manually from interim exchange server to local .pst file (which creates 2 .pst file). We can either leave them local as archives or migrate them to the exchange mail box in the future (limit 2GB).

There was a Microsoft project manager in the room, plus a guy from Microsoft Premier services who was on site to help us with this particular task. Then there was the Microsoft Engineer who is designing the global infrastructure.

The two Microsoft guys (planning engineer and premier) kept going back and forth to determine who was going to have to deal with the issue. Basically, the main point was that it is not simple to migrating from one Exchange environment to another Exchange environment. The planning engineer said that its just as much work to migrate from Exchange to Exchange than it is to migrate from Domino to Exchange. It takes the same amount of planning and design….and thus time. They really did not want us to setup a temporary Exchange environment. They wanted us to do nothing.

In the end, we’ve decided to fire up the Domino server cluster that we built for this site and turn on the POP3 task. The reason we had to fire them up is because we thought Microsoft was going to need them for temporary Exchange servers, so we made Ghost images of them and powered them off to save electricity.

The reason we are having Microsoft plan this is so that when that site actually does get migrated to the global Exchange environment that it will be considered “in scope” and they will handle the migration without claiming that it wasn’t planned for in the scope defining.

P.S. No one here REALLY thinks that they’ll be able to roll anything out in 9 to 10 weeks as they claim.

FOOTNOTES:
Exchange must be 2007 before it can be virtualized. Must meet lots of requirements quote from Microsoft Premier guy, says “it’s not simple.”
Exchange 2007 can only be installed on 64bit compatible architecture.
Exchange 2003 must have a shared storage, otherwise it must be stand alone…you cannot use CCR.
Exchange 2007 requires us to have 3 servers to use CCR. The third servers becomes the transport role. so effectively, you must have 2007 to use CCR, and then you must have 3 servers.
In Exchange 2007 there are 5 roles: Edge, Client Access Server (CAS) or Outlook Web Access (OWA), Unified messaging (UM), transport for SMTP connection, and the 5th role is mailbox

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