- [Narrator] The last two videos focused on
high availability features and Windows server.
Features that help you recover
from unforeseen catastrophes.
The cluster options of Storage Spaces Direct
and the simple redundancy Storage Replica
are great safety measures to have in place.
But not all workload migrations are emergencies.
Sometimes, it's just time to
move a workload to a new server.
Migrating many of the roles and features
can be done using SMIG tools or their own
unique processes designed to move the
entire configuration from one place to another.
But file servers can be a different animal.
If you have an old file server that
needs to be retired, you're probably
dreading the task ahead of you.
Copying files from one place to
another, that's easy enough.
But to really migrate that workload, you have
to find a way to copy file permissions,
and share permissions, create the new shares,
and set the quotas and encryption and
whatever else might be going on on your old file server.
I think we all understand the problem,
and Microsoft had fielded questions
about this issue for quite a while.
They've now introduced a new feature
to facilitate just this type of migration.
Storage Migration Service is their answer.
And this feature has three parts, or roles to
be played by servers in your network.
The orchestrator, this is a server that has to be
at least Windows Server 2019, it could be newer.
It's going to take on the role of managing this migration.
It could be the target or the new file server,
or it could be a separate machine all together.
But it needs to be configured with the Storage
Migration Service, as well as the SMS Proxy feature.
The next server in the mix is the
new file server, the destination server.
This is the machine that's going to accept
the migration with all of the configuration.
It also needs to be Windows Server 2019
or an equivalent Semi-Annual release of Windows Server.
And it needs to have at least the SMS proxy role installed.
It doesn't need the actual SMS feature
if it's not going to play the role of orchestrator as well.
But it does need that SMS proxy role installed.
And, don't forget the plan for enough storage
space to accept all of the files on the old file server,
and leave room for future growth.
Finally, we have the Source server.
This is the old file server that's
been doing its job for a while.
The requirements here are pretty simple.
It needs to be a least Windows server 2003, and that's it.
There's nothing else to install on that machine.
But let's face it, if your file server is running
Windows server 2003, you've really been putting this off.
Another requirement here, is that all of these servers
need to be part of the same active directory domain,
and you need a domain account that is a local administrator
on both the destination and the source machines.
Never forget the firewall, you need to make sure that you've
opened the local firewall on your target and source machines
to allow SMB and Net Logon into the servers.
You also need to allow in WMI and DCOM as well.
Once the firewall is configured, you can add
the extension to the Windows admin center.
And this has changed since the preview.
At this point, if you load the Windows admin center,
and select one of the servers involved,
you can find the storage migration service
in the menu on the left, and a really
convenient install button on the right.
Once that's installed, you can use the Windows admin center
to do the migration, and it will happen in three phases.
First, an inventory is conducted to
determine what is on the source server.
Second, the files are migrated, including share names
and all of the details that keep most of us
from doing this kind of migration.
Third, the cut over phase will migrate the IP addresses
and assign the destination server the computer name
of the original source server.
At that point, you're going to need to
rename or decommission the old server.
Users will be able to access the same files with the
same network path and be none the wiser
that you just swapped out an entire server.