Its that day where you thought finally you got everything working perfectly with your Exchange infrastructure & your manager walk in and say our old storage where your Microsoft Exchange Server is installed is getting out of warranty and the good news we are replacing it with this new shiny storage box which should give us a better performance and durability. I need this done in a week time. Now you start scratching your head on how to move you Microsoft Exchange 2003 Cluster or Microsoft Exchange 2007 SCC(Single Copy Cluster) to the new SAN. While my article here can not do the work for you. It will show you how you can do it with ease, & without doing mailbox movement although that might be another good way to do it if you have extra hardware for it! Below is how to migrate your Microsoft Exchange Cluster to a new SAN. As well you can find my article on migrating SQL at: https://tsmguru.com/data-migration/microsoft-sql-cluster-data-migration-to-a-new-san.html

Steps to Migrate MS Exchange 2007/2003 to a new SAN Box

MS Exchange Storage Migration Preparation Steps:

1- Make sure there is an adequate back in place in case anything go wrong

2- Present both SAN boxes to your MS Exchange server. Check with your hardware vendor if there is any special requirement you need to do this.

3- Test the Current Exchange failover & failback

4- Create the new arrays, LUNs similar to what was used on your original storage. Though create two luns for the Quorum drive as one of extra Quorum drive will be required during the migration.

5- Add the new array and its LUNs to the same switch as the existing array (on the new switches).

6- Configure the LUN masking on the switch to expose the new LUNs to all cluster Nodes.

Moving MS Exchange Quorum drive to the new SAN

1. Collect all used drive letters in the cluster to avoid causing a conflict.

2. Use the disk management tools in Windows to rescan the drives

3. Use the active node to partition and format the disks (Proper Labeling will easy identifying disks at later steps).

4. Use Cluster Administrtor to create the new physical disk resources and put them into their proper cluster groups

5. Create a temp Cluster Group.

6. Move the Quorum using the GUI to a temp location

   1. In Cluster Administrator, right click the cluster name

   2. Select Properties

   3. Select the Quorum tab

   4. Use the drop down box to select a temp location for the quorum

7. Delete the existing MSDTC folder (if any)

   1. Stop the MSDTC resource

   2. Copy the MSDTC folder from Q: to the final qurom disk target location

   3. Stop the Q: resource (remember, the quorum isn’t there anymore)

   4. Delete the MSDTC resource

8. Move the quorum to its final location

   1. Go into disk management and change the Q: name to another letter

   2. Use disk management and name the final quorum drive to Q:

   3. Repeat steps 6.1-6.4 to move the quorum to its final destination

9. Recreate the MSDTC resource

   1. Create a new MSDTC resource with the clustername network name resource and the new Q: as dependencies

   2. Bring the MSDTC resource online

8. Move the old Quorum & MSDTC drives to a temp cluster group

Moving Exchange 2003 Databases & Log Files to the New SAN

1. Stop the cluster service and the Exchange cluster groups.

2. Move the data from the old disks to the new ones. Tools such as  CloneDisk or SynchroFolder can be of a great help in here. For more info about them check out my earlier post: Microsoft SQL Cluster Data Migration to a new SAN

3. Re-letter the old disks to something outside the current range, but do not remove them yet – we might need to use them in our back out plan

4. Re-letter the new disks to the same drive letter as the old ones

5. Move the old drives to a temp cluster group

6. Verify that all dependent resources are pointing to the proper physical disk resource.

7. Ensure the permissions on the drive and the registery key mentioned in MS Article #821915 are in place

8. Restart the cluster service

9. Make sure the new drive letters and disk resources are showing up properly in cluster administrator

10. Bring everything back online.

11. Ensure the cluster is working with the new resources after getting the temp cluster group offline, if so it is safe then to remove the old drives.

12. steps 1 – 11 will have to be repeated for every Virtual server.

Decomissioning OLD SAN 

1. Disconnect OLD SAN from the switch after all the drivers has been removed from the Exchange servers.

2. Upgrade the Firmware & Drivers of the HBAs as required.

3. Carry out any changes to your multipathing drivers and so on that was not possible when the two storages were connected to the system.

Recommendations:

• One day shall be reserved for testing after the migration has finished.
• Don’t delete the LUNs from the old storage as soon the migration is completed, but rather just remove their mapping and leave them to be recalled on in case if something to go wrong.

I hope this help. Please leave your feedback & questions in the comments area below.