What Are the Common Data Migration Performance Factors?

Data can be moved from an organization using on-premises email to Microsoft 365 or Office 365 in several ways. How to enhance data migration performance and maximize migration pace are often asked questions while planning the move. This article covers the performance of migrations.

Data transfer in Microsoft 365 or Office 365 may be seamlessly migrated from on-premises Exchange servers with the help of hybrid deployment migration. A hybrid deployment migration is the quickest way to transfer mailbox data to Office 365 or Microsoft 365.

Data Source

System functionality takes a lot of work to extract data. For improved migration speed, the source system has to have enough resources, such as CPU and RAM. The source system is often close to being capable of handling the normal end-user workload at the migration time. Because of a shortage of system resources, some end users might have access issues.

Keep an eye on the system performance when testing a migration pilot. It is advisable not to use an aggressive migration plan for the particular system when it is busy due to the possibility of migration delay and service availability difficulties. If at all feasible, increase the performance of the source system by expanding hardware resources and decrease system load by shifting users and tasks to other servers not participating in the conversion.

Additionally, it is recommended to make a migration user list evenly spread among several mailbox servers and databases if you move from an on-premises associated organization with numerous mailbox database servers.

Other back-end activities are active throughout the migration. Because it’s recommended to carry out migrations after work hours, migrations frequently interfere with other maintenance operations on your on-premises systems, such as data backup.

Migration Server

An Exchange hybrid server serves as the migration server for hybrid deployment migration, a cloud-initiated pull or pushes data migration. Customers frequently forget about this and employ a low-scale virtual machine to function as a hybrid server. As a result, migration performance suffers.

Along with implementing the previously mentioned best practices, the following are evaluated as best practices, which led to enhanced migration performance in actual client migrations:

• The Exchange hybrid servers use robust server-class real computers rather than virtual ones.
• Utilize several hybrid servers positioned behind the client’s network load balancer.
• Office 365 and Microsoft 365 native technologies are used in hybrid deployment migration. It is throttled by Microsoft 365 and Office 365 migration planning.
• Create geographically proximate migration endpoints to increase migration speed if your on-premises infrastructure consists of numerous sites dispersed over different regions. This is so that the migration, instead of utilizing a centralized migration endpoint that uses your on-premises network, may use Microsoft’s network in such a scenario.

Demo Showing the FastTrack for Microsoft 365 migration experience

Exchange 2003 vs. Later Versions of Exchange

When moving from Exchange 2003, there is a significant difference in how the end user will feel. Exchange 2003 end users have no access to their mailboxes while their data is being transferred, unlike end users of subsequent versions of Exchange.

Since migration performance is sometimes poor due to substantial mailbox sizes or sluggish networks, Exchange 2003 users are typically more worried about when to plan migrations and how long it would take to move.

The Exchange 2003 transfer process is likewise quite susceptible to delays. As an illustration, a service problem happened while transferring a 10GB mailbox in a genuine customer migration at the halfway point.

Restarting the Office 365 client access server, the problem was fixed, which handled the data movement. This required the client to transfer all 10GB of data once more because the migration of that mailbox had to be resumed. The migration could not start over where it left off.

Network

Customers using Exchange 2010 or later can execute numerous test mailbox migrations to verify the network performance for hybrid migrations. Alternatively, you may test the speed of the migration by moving actual user mailboxes using the -SuspendWhenReadyToComplete option. Remove the move request when testing is finished to protect end users.

Office 365 Service

Migrations utilizing the Microsoft 365 or Office 365 hybrid deployment migrations are impacted by Microsoft 365 and Office 365 resource health-based throttling.

Conclusion

Data migration is coming whether your company is modernizing its systems, switching to the cloud, or consolidating its data. It’s a big and significant undertaking, and the accuracy of the data requires that it be completed properly.

 

Interesting read: 6 Tips On How to Make Data Driven Decisions for Your Business