OCS 2007 R2: Migrating Global Settings

re: OCS 2007 R2: Migrating Global Settings

Elan Shudnow — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:53:29 GMT

Aaron Tiensivu and I just did the System Container to the Configuration Partition migration last night in our production forest last night and it was successful. In our forest we also have contacts for users in our other forest which have them stamped with the OCS attribute so users in our forest will see them in the address book. We updated those contacts as well.

Another tip is that we were going to leave Step 7 (removing the System partition) there for a week or so to make sure everything was working fine. The services on the FE started fine but Mediation Servers were failing. Event viewer showed that there were duplicate objects in AD. So we decided to do an LDIFDE dump of the System Container to be safe and then removed it. Mediation Server started up just fine after.

So all in all, it was a success. Figured I would post those tips. Aaron Tiensivu blogged about our endeavor over at hit blog: http://blog.tiensivu.com/aaron/archives/1801-In-the-trenches-OCS-2007-R1-migration-of-global-settings-container-in-prep-for-OCS-2007-R2-upgrade-gotchas-and-workarounds-with-OCSMigrate.vbs.html

re: OCS 2007 R2: Migrating Global Settings

Fred C — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:03:43 GMT

MS has provided no real explanation as to why they recommend this migration other than references to performance issues. its still not clear what the performance issues are and in what type of environment folks would most likely see the performance issues. What exactly is the performance issue with? the documentation indicates some impact to start/shutdown. I there any impact to IM/Archiving etc...? i see one quote related to root domain availability. Can you clarify what good root domain availability is? I think we need to get a better explanation, before running a script that has not backup process and touches every OCS/LCS user.

re: OCS 2007 R2: Migrating Global Settings

Elan Shudnow — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 06:26:05 GMT

Fred, while I'm not an MS employee, I want to throw in my 2 cents here. I've never honestly been a fan of the System Partition. Now if you're in a single domain environment, having OCS in your System Partition isn't a really big deal.

The reasoning behind my statement is because the system partition is stored in your Domain Partition. This Domain Partition will replicate to every single Domain Controller. Because of this, your OCS Data is available in all cases.

Now if you are in a multi-domain environment, all domains are trusted due to the nature of transitive trusts. Now if your data is stored in the System Partition of your Root Domain, this data is NOT replicated forest wide. This means that in order to ensure the OCS data is always available, you need to ensure you have good connectivity to your forest root. Storing it in your forest root's System Partition allows you to reduce the bloat of your Configuration Partition thus reducing the amount of data that needs to be replicated across Domain Controllers in your environment.

But why would you want to take the risk of your OCS data not being available due to the network? One of the purposes of the Configuration partition is to ensure that all Domain Controllers are aware of the data. Because of this, I have always chosen the Configuration Partition because I knew that it was always the best option in my opinion to make sure network interruptions don't affect OCS data availability. And I always had a feeling that Microsoft would change their recommendations in the future and switch over to the Configuration partition. I guessed right. :)

Sorry for the long opinionated explanation.

re: OCS 2007 R2: Migrating Global Settings

Peter Schmatz — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:49:52 GMT

Thanks Elan for your write up. This is right on target to why we recommend the Configuration container in R2. That said if you are running an OCS 2007 or LCs 2005 SP1 deployment with the OCS configuration in the System container, and you don't have any issues, there is no need to migrate it to the Configuration container.

BTW: We are talking here about the OCS/LCS configuration data, not the user data in AD.

Peter