What Makes Migrating to the Cloud Different than On-Premises?

CHRISTIAN BUCKLEY

CHIEF EVANGELIST @METALOGIX

Christian BuckleyChief Evangelist & SharePoint MVP

Metalogix

www.buckleyplanet.com

@buckleyplanet

cbuck@metalogix.com

For over a decade, Metalogix has developed the industry’s best and most trusted management tools for SharePoint, Exchange, and Office 365, backed by our live 24x7 support.

Over 14,000 clients rely on Metalogix tools every minute of every day to monitor, migrate, store, synchronize, archive, secure, and backup their collaboration platforms.

We are committed to your Success with SharePoint!

What Makes Migrating to the Cloud Different than On-Premises?

What I’ll cover today:

• The inevitable move toward the cloud?

• Common migration scenarios

• SharePoint Online limitations and current migration performance issues

• Planning best practices

The nature of how we collaborate has evolved, and continues to evolve

We’re moving from these “systems of record” to a more social, collaborative “systems

of engagement” model

~ John Mancini, CEO of AIIM.org

SharePoint 2013 was a pivotal release

• As SharePoint continues to expand its footprint, companies are demanding flexible architectures to help them better meet internal and external collaboration needs

• Reducing costs

• Reducing headcount

• Doing more with less

• Focusing less on traditional IT activities and more on activities that will help drive the business forward

Why are we talking about Cloud?

Alternatives for control, cost, & capability

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

(network architects)

Software as a Service (SaaS)(end users)

Platform as a Service (PaaS)(app developers and designers)

Organizing for the Cloud

Infrastructure maintained solely for customer

On premises or off

Managed by the customer, or by a 3rd party hoster

Private Cloud Hybrid Cloud

Multiple infrastructure options

Components both on premises and off premises

Management spread between customer and 3rd party hosters

Infrastructure shared by multiple customers

Off premises

Managed by 3rd party on behalf of customers

Public Cloud

4 workloads in one platform

SharePoint Exchange Yammer OneDrive for Business

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4633.what-is-infrastructure-as-a-service.aspx

Build

Buy

In HouseOut Source

Partner Hosted Private Cloud

• Dedicated environment

• Externally hosted

• Externally or internally managed

• Internally designed

Self Hosted Private Cloud

• Dedicated environment

• Internally hosted

• Internally managed

• Internally designed

Shared or Dedicated Public

Cloud• Shared or dedicated

environment

• Externally hosted

• Externally managed

• Externally designed

Dedicated Public Cloud

• Partially or fully dedicated

• Externally hosted

• Externally or internally managed

• Minimal customization

Traditional on prem

Answering “Build vs Buy”

Common Scenarios

Rapid provisioning of new workloads on Office 365 while maintaining existing on-premises workloads

Organizations wishing to migrate existing workloads from an on-premises environment to the cloud over time in a phased approach

Organizations wanting to supplement their cloud environment with additional features or customizations which are currently only possible on-premises

Compliance or data sovereignty reasons which might stipulate certain data be hosted in a particular location

Hybrid SharePoint Environments with Office 365, Microsoft

Common solutions for the Cloud

On Premises Cloud

ADAzure ADADFS

Moving to the Cloud on your terms

Advantages of SPO

No need to plan for

Scalability

Licensing

Disaster recovery

Business continuity

Ongoing maintenance and upgrades

No need to migrate to a future version

Plan a Large Scale Migration to SharePoint Online (SlideShare) by Erica Toelle

What about my existing investment in SharePoint?

Most SharePoint deployments have included customizations to meet critical business needs User Management & Administration

Security and Compliance

Auditing, Reporting, Alerting

User Adoption, Records

Branding, etc…

Consider the business problems you’ve already invested in solving

Is there risk in moving my data

to the cloud?

Building Trust

Planning

SPO is not an apple to apple move

Understand what you are trying to accomplish before you disrupt and attempt to move systems

Vs.

Migration Methodology

Methodology used internally at Microsoft

Plan a Large Scale Migration to SharePoint Online (SlideShare) by Erica Toelle

Understand what can and should be moved to the cloud

What are you planning to move?

Create a SharePoint Inventory

URLs

Site Collection Name

Site Collection Size

Sub site count

Large Lists

Document Versions

Customizations

Site Location/position

Content DB – Size, Number

Site Collections per DBDuplicate or Orphaned Site CollectionsMy Sites – Content DB, Size

SharePoint 2013 Thresholds and Limitshttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx

Run a “health assessment”

Inventory your system and data

3rd party tools

Workflows

Customizations

Custom branding

Versions

LOB app integrations and other data connections

Topology

Site usage metrics

Reporting

Prioritize your plans

Determine which sites, site collections, and solutions should be moved first

Organize your information architecture, map the old system to the new

Select test sites, use UAT to refine your plans

Determine the right migration approach for each site and site collection

Manual

Scripted

3rd party tool

Assisted (partner or Microsoft)

Develop an Information Architecture (IA)

Evaluate current business process

Consider existing site structures

Departmental/team reorganization

Publishing requirements

Search/findability

Navigation

Content Growth

“Over half feel they would be 50% more productive with enhanced workflow, search, information reporting, and automated document creation tools” 1

1 – The SharePoint Puzzle – adding the missing pieces, AIIM, 2012

Know your limits

Migrations to SharePoint Online (SPO) have some significant limitations when compared to migrations from on-premises environments to on-prem, or to dedicated offerings such as Office 365-D (Microsoft’s dedicated service), Azure, AWS, Rackspace and other environments.

These limitations have a significant impact not only on what is possible with migrations of on-premises SharePoint and other content to SPO, but also on performance of migrations to SPO.

Microsoft continues to expand these APIs, and it is likely that many but not all of these limitations will be removed over time

SharePoint on-prem to online migration limitations

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Limited APIs. Migrations to on-premises and private cloud (e.g. Azure/Amazon/O365-D) implementations of SharePoint support the use of the full SharePoint Server Object Model, the richest API available for SharePoint, or a thin web services layer that exposes the SharePoint Server Object Model (Metalogix Extensions Web Services/MEWS), for both reading, and writing SharePoint Content.

Due to the multi-tenant nature of SPO, Microsoft cannot expose the full SharePoint Object Model in SPO.

Limited automation and controls around migration and provisioning.

Microsoft currently expose three, relatively limited API’s that are useful for migrations: • The Client Side Object Model

(CSOM) • The Native Web Services (NWS)

API • The REST based interfaces to the

CSOM

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Inability to connect at the Farm/Tenant level (CSOM) - With the full SharePoint Object Model or MEWS, users can connect at the Web Application or Farm level. With the CSOM adapter users cannot connect at the closest equivalent, which is the Tenant level

• Users have to create Site Collections in the SPO admin page prior to connecting to them.

• Using 3rd party migration tools, users may have to create a separate connection for each Site collection in SPO. Users are unable to browse/search for all root level Site Collections, and may require more steps to promote Sites to Site Collections.

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Inability to preserve Item IDs in lists

• Lists with dependencies on other lists such as Lookup columns rely on Item IDs in the Lookup lists.

• Because the CSOM does not support retaining the Item ID of list items, some 3rd party tools have created workarounds that may impact performance.

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Copying MySites can only be done one MySite at a time, and does not include User Profile information.

• Unlike on-prem to on-prem migrations where MySites can be moved in a single operation, in SPO admins must first create each MySite.

• Admins then need to connect to each MySite Site Collection separatey, and then copy the content from the source, pasting it into the target MySite.

• Admins cannot copy MySite profile information.

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Versioning limitations in the CSOM API.

• No support for migration of minor versions of documents

• Authorship information for rejected versions in a document library with approval is lost.

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Nintex workflows cannot yet be migrated to Office 365 due to these same CSOM limitations.

Nintex workflows must be recreated using the Nintex SPO offering to the best extent as possible.

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Most on premises 3rd party solutions are either not available in SPO, or their functionality is greatly reduced

Work with vendor to understand product roadmap and capabilities. Other options are to build using out of the box capability.

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Inability to troubleshoot issues Required to work through Microsoft support and SLAs. Retrieving a correlation ID for a error could take days/weeks

Ways to improve migration performance

SPO Performance

SPO is on the open internet, and is a multi-tenant environment.

Microsoft utilizes a number of methods to protect SPO customer environments and the integrity of these server farms.

Based on performance benchmarking by SharePoint ISV Metalogix, there is an impact of between 40% and 45% on the performance of migrations to SPO because of some of these necessary protection mechanisms.

SPO Performance

Mechanism Impact

User and Tenant-based throttling, which ensures that no single user or tenant can perform so many simultaneous operations that it would cause performance issues for other tenants*

Large or complex migration jobs can be cut off mid-migration.

*For more information, see HTTP Request Throttling in SharePoint 2010 which still applies to 2013.

SPO Performance

Mechanism Impact

Farm-based throttling. If a SPO farm becomes unhealthy due to extreme levels of activity, Microsoft may throttle migrations to SPO and not permit them to continue until farm health returns to normal.

Any migration job can be throttle at any time of day (usually during peak time. This makes migration performance extremely unpredictable, and variable based on time of day, day of week, and other variables out of your control.

SPO Performance

Mechanism Impact

Virus scanning SPO requires stringent virus scanning to ensure all tenants on the shared farm are protected, but it slows down migrations as each document migrated must be scanned.

SPO Performance

Mechanism Impact

Hardware-based load balancing determines which Web Front End (WFE) server in the farm to route incoming traffic, based on how busy any given WFE is at that time

This can slow down migrations that are large (content) or complex (many items with multiple metadata fields, and/or many versions)

SPO Performance

Mechanism Impact

Third-party commercial denial of service monitoring platform for monitoring and throttling capabilities*

This can slow down migrations that are large (content) or complex (many items with multiple metadata fields, and/or many versions)

*See The Office 365 Trust Center for more information.

SPO Performance

Mechanism Impact

Third-party commercial denial of service monitoring platform for monitoring and throttling capabilities*

This can slow down migrations that are large (content) or complex (many items with multiple metadata fields, and/or many versions)

SPO Performance

Microsoft is working on figuring out workarounds that could potentially allow migration vendors to improve the performance of migrations when clients using those vendors indicate that they are in the process of migrating to SPO.

Metalogix internal benchmarking and data from customers has shown that for SPO migrations with a single machine averaged between 200MB and 550MB/hour depending on the workload, the time of day, how busy the farm is, and numerous other factors that are outside of our control.

SPO Performance

Disabling the ‘Following Content’ site feature (not site collections) can improve migration performance:

This feature is enabled by default when a new site is created. When it is disabled, performance of Site copies improves by approximately 20% to 25% for document-heavy workloads.

SPO Performance

Due to the migration performance, it is recommended that you take a gradual migration approach

May involve migrating one division at a time, and going live with that division.

Allows you to assess the impact on your business users and your helpdesk after moving one group of people to a new user interface.

Also allows you to use focus groups to determine which features you would like to implement as you gradually migrate the business to SPO.

Additional SPO Considerations

SPO Hybrid Considerations

• Size and geographical distribution of an organization can affect cloud adoption.

• Regulatory compliance and governance requirements can limit cloud options.

• Service-level agreements (SLAs) may limit cloud options.

• It is important to understand the ROI of any proposed solution (and the cost of change).

• Hybrid may be more of a transitional environment from on prem to the cloud.

http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2014/02/office-365-sharepoint-hybrid-what-you-do-and-do-not-get.html

Factors in your cloud planning

Location / facilities Software licenses and support Hardware and maintenance Onsite support, personnel skills Level of customization Governance, auditing, security, compliance Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Upgrades and migration

Focusing on the end user experienceFocusing on the end user experience

Things to consider as you focus more on engagement:

Things to consider:

Be clear on your system constraints Understand and prioritize your key use

cases Determine what should be local, what can

be in the cloud, what should be available via mobile devices

Constantly review and take action on what can be automated and optimized

Resources

• Plan a Large Scale Migration to SharePoint Online (SlideShare) by Erica Toelle http://www.slideshare.net/ericatoelle/plan-a-large-scale-migration-to-h

• Top 8 Migration Tips for Office 365 http://news.dice.com/2012/05/08/office-365-migration-tips/

• SharePoint On-Premises Or In The Cloud? Why not both? (John Ross) http://bit.ly/1pl2UOY

• Office 365 and Hybrid Solutions (Scott Hoag and Dan Usher) http://slidesha.re/1r6oIeP

• Your SharePoint Path Forward: On Prem, Cloud, or Hybrid http://bit.ly/1or8ngE

• SharePoint 2013 Thresholds and Limits (TechNet) http://bit.ly/QC7mK1

• Free Migration Planning Tool www.metalogix.com/products/Migration-Expert.aspx

• Pre-migration Analysis & Preparation www.metalogix.com/products/ControlPoint.aspx

• Plan for SharePoint 2013 (TechNet) http://bit.ly/VTcuuY

• Demystifying OneDrive for Business http://bit.ly/1rCyYPR

• Migrate Cloud Files to SharePoint Online & OneDrive for Business (free tool) http://www.metalogix.com/Products/Drive2Office365.aspx

• Yes, You Can Move Straight From SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2013 http://bit.ly/1lyyg3L

Thank you!

www.buckleyplanet.com

@buckleyplanet

cbuck@metalogix.com