What’s up, everyone!
This blog will provide a demo on how to migrate data from a file server to Microsoft Teams channels or to a personal Onedrive using Microsoft Migration Manager.
Migration Manager Prerequisites
Let’s talk about the prerequisites, which at the time of writing are:
The two most notable are:
1: A local caching disk with at least 150 GB free space.
I have had cases where it was not easy to free up some storage or add an internal disk (virtualized or physical). I solved this issue by using an external (SSD) disk with enough free space.
2: An OS of Windows 2012 R2 or higher, Windows 10 or higher.
In one of my data migrations I came across a server using Server 2008. So that immediately ruled out the Sharepoint Migration Tools (SPMT) and the Migration Manager tool. A simple fix is to install the agent on a domain joined Windows 10 or higher machine.
To access the admin page, open the Sharepoint Admin Center and click on the Migration blade.
For this demo, we will migrate data from a file share to a Teams site.
Migration Manager Agent
Before we can start, we need to install the Migration Manager agent.
Click on the Agents tab.
Click on the Add button. This will trigger a download prompt. Download and run the agentsetup.exe on the system target system of your choice.
The installation is pretty straightforward. It will ask you to login with your credentials to register with the Migration Manager backend.
Once the installation is complete, check the Migration Manager blade in the Sharepoint Admin Center. The agent should be visible in the Agents tab.
There are a couple of options we can edit. Click on the agent and a new blade will appear. This blade will enable us to edit the Working folder. This folder is used as a cache location for the data migration. Please remember this folder should already exist as the wizard will not create the folder for us and the folder should be on a disk with at least 150GB of free disk space. Ee can edit the Friendly name and the Agent group if we want to. A validation will check if the folder exists and if the disk has enough free disk space.
In this blade we can edit the Friendly agent name and the Working folder. Configure the working folder to an existing folder on the target disk and make sure the disk has at least 150GB of free disk space.
Scans and Migrations
Once the agent is installed and configured, it’s time to talk about the Scans and Migrations tab.
File shares are automatically scanned when we add a source. When the scans are complete, download the report and check for possible migration issues.
The Migrations tab allows us to create a new migration and provides us a simple but effective overview of all the configured migrations. It shows us the name, the source patch, the destination location, the status and more.
If we click on one of the Migrations, we will get a new blade with more details;
It is really easy to create new migration. On the Migrations tab, click on the Add Task button.
On the method page, we need to choose if we want to perform a single source and destination migration which is really easy or if we want to perform a bulk migration. If we perform a bulk migration, we need to prepare a CSV of JSON file. Here’s the Microsoft provided example.
Just to show how easy this tool really is, I will choose a single migration.
Provide a source path;
For this demo, I will choose a Teams site with the General channel.
Once everything is configured, we need to enter a task name and configure the options. We can choose if we want to run the task immediately or later. We can choose the Agent group and check common settings, if we need to.
If we expand the All settings options, we get some more options to configure. At the time of writing, we can configure:
- Filters for hidden files
- Filter on dates for files and folders
- Filter on extensions
- Replace invalid file name characters
- Azure Active Directory User lookup (default on)
- Perform user mapping via File
- Automatically rerun failed tasks up to 4 times
The task will show up in the Migrations tab.
Some things to keep in mind
An agent can only perform one migration at a time. So if you have multiple migrations and just one agent, it is possible that some migrations are waiting for another one to complete.
The Migrations overview will show us the status of the migrations. The demo migration will not start, because there’s no active agent in the group. This issue is easy to fix ofcourse. But there could be a couple of issues why your migration won’t start. Microsoft has our backs with a great agent troubleshooting article.
That’s it for this short demo on Microsoft’s Migration Manager. Pretty cool tool right!