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yo_beeFlag for United States of America

asked on

Option for relocating Exchangs DB's

I have an 2010 Exchange system that I need to do a few things with.  One of the things I would like to do is also migrate from my old domain name to the new one, but this seems to be a task I am not 100% sure I can do and a consultant wants to charge a large sum of money to do this.

  1. Migrate to a new Domain. How hard is this and moving to O365 in a new tenant  an option?
  2. Relocate DB's to a new VMDK.  The DB's are currently on LUNS that are connected to the VM via iSCSI.  The reason I am asking this is because vCenter does not see these drives so to back this machine up I need to do it old school as if it was a physical server.  I would like to move the DB's to another drive that is a VMDK.  I have 7 DB's all around 500 GB each.
  3. Or should I do a mailbox move to new DB's located on the VMDKs?
Avatar of timgreen7077
timgreen7077

if you dont have many large mailboxes I would always just do normal mailbox move. you can always add a new smtp domain to exchange in order to recieve mail on that new domain provided you own the domain of course. yes also moving to o365 is an option and also doable
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ASKER

The main goal was to get off this Domain completely and swing AD, Exchange, SQL and other resources to the new Domain.  As stated it was a much bigger undertaking than I originally thought.  Now fast forward to today and the idea of Office 365 is now in the picture.  Since we have to move data to O365 would this be the ideal time to do the migration or not?

On the exchange front on avg the MB's are 5 GB, but there are some heavy hitter with 30 to 50 GB MB's.  
Does doing a DB move require a complete dismounting of the DB and put it offline for the duration of the move?
Yes, moving a DB takes it offline. Moving mailboxes is an online operation.

If you have DAG, I highly recommend mailbox moves. I believe that DAG blocks database moves.
Need to understand following point..
1. Are you planning to migrate whole mailbox to New domain? if so, is it that new forest has been created and new exchange server has been created with LUN attached to it?
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ASKER

So the desired goal is to move to a completely new domain.  I have a new domain with a trust established. Did some mirror testing, but I pulled back when I looked at Exchange and the coexistent.  My goal was to move the DB's to VMDK's and off the LUNs, but because of the uncertainty of the coexistent and other unforeseen I just added the new domain name in AD and change the UPN as well as the default domain reply in exchange, but the underlying domain is still the same.  

Because my be backup system has an issue with backing up Exchange the say it is currently configured I want to just move the DB's to VMDK's and remain as is in the domain.
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ASKER

@kevinhsieh  No DAG
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