Last week I was speaking at the Dutch TechDays in the Hague on StorSimple and Hybrid Cloud Storage. Microsoft was kind enough to release update 1 for StorSimple 8000 the day before my talk. Since the time between the release and my talk was a little short, I couldn’t mention all awesomeness that was upon us in that update.

So here we are, a few days later, and one of the main features that is unlocked in the “update 1” release, is the ability to migrate data from a StorSimple 5000/7000 to an 8000-series StorSimple device.

In this post I’ll provide you with a rough outline, the link to the migration document can be found at the bottom of this blogpost.

Why migrate?

No migration of anything should ever be started after asking the “why” question… What’s in it for us, the users of this Microsoft storage solution? I’ll provide you with a few answers why you might want to migrate towards an 8000-series StorSimple.

1) Efficient centralized management of multiple devices through StorSimple Manager service ?
2) Better class of hardware and updated firmware ?
3) The use of Virtual devices for test and DR?
4) Features in the future roadmap which can’t be disclosed at this time

Pre-requisites

Even with migrations in the cloud there are some steps that need to be taken into account before proceeding with the actual migration. The pre-requisites in this migration workload are:

2015-06-01_15-53-38

 

Supported migration scenario’s

2015-06-01_15-57-21

Changes in volume types

If you’re involved with StorSimple since the 5 and 7000 series, you might have seen that there were more types of Volumes in the earlier models, where in the 8000 series we can choose from a “Primary”  or a “Archive”  volume. The following table explains the conversion.

2015-06-01_16-00-58

StorSimple Migration, High-Level

Again, since it’s not my goal to copy the entire StorSimple migration guide, which can be found here, I’ll only provide you with the high-level steps to complete a StorSimple migration.

1) Prepare the Source Device
2) Import configuration from Source Device
3) Start the migrationplans
4) Take source volumes offline on the FileServer (Start of downtime)
5) Take volumes offline on StorSimple source device
6) Disable the backup policies on source device
7) Backup the source device with cloud snapshots
8) Import Volume Containers from Source Device
9) Verify Data Integrity
10) Restore Volumes from backup catalog
11) Mount and bring volumes online on target device
12) Commit or roll back migration
13) Clean Source device

With a big “Thank You”  to Meghan Liese for pointing me towards the documentation!

 

 

 

 

 

Leave a Reply