QMM Transmission Agent (NTA) and Robocopy

Quest Migration Manager (QMM) has its own logic to transfer (migrate) from data a source mailbox to a target mailbox  MSA –> NTA –> MTA.  Latest version of QMM for Exchange supports multiple agents on Quest Agent Host.  You  can have up to 10 MSAs and 10 MTAs but Transmission Agent (NTA) is still limited to 1 per Agent Host.  This is still a huge limitation when transferring  large amount of data.  Quest’s NTA still performs a single threaded, sequential operation.  Even if you have enough “available” bandwidth, these types of applications cannot be able to use all available bandwidth. 

In QMM for Exchange, NTA is responsible for referring the exacted PRV files from Source to Target agent servers.  If NTA is the bottleneck, you can use any other mechanism to copy PRV  files from Transmission OUT folder to Transmission IN Folder.  Keep in mind that you need to copy all extracted files at the same time (or in the correct order).   I have decided replace NTA with a Robocopy option for the initial data copy.  With Robocopy, you can specify the thread up to 128. 

Using the following method, I have reduced the file copy time from weeks to hours!

1. Stop Transmission Agent (NTA)
2. Stop Mail Target Agent (MTA)
3. Start Mail Source Agent (MSA) and generate all PRV files from source mailboxes.
4. After the initial creation of all PRV files (you can verify this by reviewing the MSA log file), Stop MSA
5. Perform a Robocopy operation to copy all files from OUT folder to IN folder.  Here is an example:

Robocopy “\\SourceAgentHost01\C$\Windows\SysWOW64\Aelita Exchange Migration Wizard\Mail Transmission Agent\OUT\TargetAgetnHost01\2” “\\TargetAgentnHost01\c$\Windows\SysWOW64\Aelita Exchange Migration Wizard\Mail Transmission Agent\IN\SourceAgentHost01\2” /MT:128

In the above example, MSA and NTA was running on SourceAgentHost01 and MTA was on TargetAgentnHost01

1. Start MTA agent and complete mail data import process. 
2. After the initial data copy, you can start the MSA, NTA and MTA agents. The delta change or update will go thought the normal Quest process (MSA –> NTA –> MTA). 

Microsoft Robocopy - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc733145.aspx

Posted in: Migration,Quest Migration Manager