The water fountain vs. the fire hose: an examination and comparison of two large enterprise mail service migrations

  • Authors:
  • Craig Stacey;Max Trefonides;Tim Kendall;Brian Finley

  • Affiliations:
  • Argonne National Laboratory;Argonne National Laboratory;Argonne National Laboratory;Argonne National Laboratory

  • Venue:
  • LISA'09 Proceedings of the 23rd conference on Large installation system administration
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Mail administrators will inevitably face a situation where they will need to migrate their users from one server to another, not infrequently migrating to a different service altogether. In 2008, two divisions of Argonne National Laboratory found themselves needing to migrate their users from disparate divisional mail servers to a central, institutional Zimbra Collaboration Server. Each group approached the situation from a different direction, driven by different motivations, timelines, and external forces; each ultimately achieved its goal, one more smoothly than the other. The first migration was driven by a high sense of urgency resulting in a "fire hose" approach, an en masse move followed by a grand switchover; the second migration was a more measured "water fountain" approach, taking in lessons learned during the first migration. Examining the processes, decisions, and tools used in each conversion yields a roadmap of successes and pitfalls that should prove useful to any systems administrators facing a similar task, regardless of the timeline within which they must work.