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Good day,

I have a fileserver role on a Win2016 Failover Cluster backed by an NTFS volume on an iSCSI LUN. I need to move its contents to another iSCSI LUN, on another block storage system.

The fileserver is in production, so I cannot just shut it down and copy all contents of one volume into another. It should remain reachable and all incremental changes taking place during the transfer operation should be also synced to the destination volume, until the moment when the fileserver is configured to use it instead of original one.

What tools are fit for such task?

It would be ideal if I could create some "mirror" (sort of software RAID-1) between the two volumes and then break it, removing the original volume. Is it possible?

Thanks!

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    Robocopy, GoodSync, etc., etc. There are a bazillion tools available to copy the data and keep it in sync.
    – joeqwerty
    Commented Mar 11 at 13:49
  • Yep, apparently there's nothing better than Robocopy. Thanks, @joeqwerty.
    – Cat Mucius
    Commented Mar 14 at 13:07
  • Have you considered that the solution needs to consider the amount and type of data?
    – Greg Askew
    Commented Mar 25 at 6:40

2 Answers 2

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The best tool for your task is the Microsoft Storage Migration Service. It makes it easier to migrate storage to another Windows Server.

Create a new virtual machine for your file server (or a new Failover Cluster role) that uses another iSCSI LUN as storage. Use SMS to migrate everything automatically and do the cutover.

Another option may be using Windows Server DFS(R) for that purpose.

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I can comment only on the external storage considerations...if you are using external block storage on a SAN through ISCSI in your current production setup and if the two block storage systems are the same platform (same vendor), i suggest to check if the platform vendor supports array-based replication feature across 2 systems. If the vendor supports synchronous mirroring in their replication feature, that would suit ideally. You could also use asynchronous mirroring however you would need to confirm manually that all data is current on the new storage system before you switch over.

At the point you want the production host to switch over to the new storage system, stop the replication from the old box to the new box(break the mirroring) and then configure the production host to use the LUN from the new storage system.

Some external block storage vendors support cross-platform replication across different storage platforms provided both platforms are made/sold by the same vendor.

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    Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please edit to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center.
    – djdomi
    Commented Mar 13 at 14:36
  • Thanks, @storsan. Unfortunately this is not the case - our storage provider is moving us from one system to another, because the original one reached its end-of-life...
    – Cat Mucius
    Commented Mar 14 at 13:09

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