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We are migrating our fileservers again.

The original servers were all standalone Windows 2000 Servers. They were migrated to a Windows 2003 cluster with about 10 Servernames that directly represented the standalone servers they replaced.

The volumes contain 100's of shares, disk mount points, SUB mount points. It's just a real mess. Close to 40 Terabytes of data.

We are trying to find the best way to migrate to a Windows 2008 cluster.

I've suggested that we use DFS Consolidated Roots to maintain the legacy links, as to not break the 1,000's of sharepoint links. In addition I'd like to consolidate many of the volumes, and completely get rid of the annoying sub mounts that we have.

On the surface, the Microsoft File Migration Toolkit appears to do exactly that.

So I've created a virutal lab environment, but what I'm finding is that with Mount Point volumes, none of the security settings are copied over, and sub mount points are completely ignored.

The DFS Consolidation Wizard seems to do it's job, which is nice. But I need a solution for consolidating the filesystem. I like the way the FSMT can correctly move the files to appropriate Resource groups based upon the file paths, it also does the nice deed of removing the old volume share once the new share is created.

But the lack of copying the security settings makes it a deal breaker. Is there possibly a tool that can square up the security settings between servers?

4 Answers 4

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I haven't done what you're doing before, but I'll throw a shout out for the SetACL utility (http://setacl.sourceforge.net/) and its backup / restore security descriptor functionality.

It would take some work to get it to do exactly what you want, because it stores absolute paths in its "backup" files (so you'd have to script something to go thru those backup files and munge up the paths), but it might just do what you want.

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If you just need the ACL settings, you could do the following command:

robocopy <source> <destination> /S /copy:SOU /SECFIX

This will copy subdirectory information, including Security ACLs, Owner, and aUditing.

Here's the relevant help information on the options above:

/COPY:copyflag[s] :: what to COPY for files (default is /COPY:DAT). (copyflags : D=Data, A=Attributes, T=Timestamps). (S=Security=NTFS ACLs, O=Owner info, U=aUditing info).

/SECFIX :: FIX file SECurity on all files, even skipped files.

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You may take deep look at richcopy to see if it works for you. It has the option to keep all files' attributes including the security settings.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.utilityspotlight.aspx?pr=blog

It also support multi-thread copying, which will increase the copying speed.

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Do you need to maintain these servers names (i guess there are linked documents through shares, so names are important) after the migration ?

We also have an MSCS files cluster, we created a dns alias for the previous file server to the cluster's name and set the key to allow netbios access through different names. This is documented by MS through a KB (reg key DisableStrictNameChecking): link text

This will reduce a lot cluster resources number and dependencies. Do you also use auto share subdirectories to reduce shares ressources ?

Are you keeping basic standard volumes, and so 2TB limited ? Or are you ok going GPT ?

I would do the most possible housecleaning before trying to move it. Cluster implementation is much more robust in 2008, and the most important, it is admin safe (no more dumb admin that remove a share through explorer instead of cluster admin)

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  • We are using DFS Consolidated Roots to maintain the legacy links. We are using GPT disks and consolidating many volumes that were previously seperated. We actually have a very good strategy for the migration, it's just that the tools provided seem to not be doing there job, and it appears to be related to using mounted volumes...
    – Jim March
    Jun 10, 2009 at 13:00

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