Migrate scalix to exchange

[acampos]

hello
i need some help regarding the migration from scalix to exchange.
is there any tool that we can use to do this migration?

is there anyone had some experience on this.

[les]

hello
i need some help regarding the migration from scalix to exchange.
is there any tool that we can use to do this migration?

is there anyone had some experience on this.

I have assisted a client in doing this, not by choice, but the decision to move to exchange was made by other individuals.
The scalix install that was done at this client side was not by me and whoever did set it up didn't do a great job. So there were some issues.

What we found though was.....

imapsync = no good. Internal messages between scalix users, when migrated to exchange via imapsync lost their received dates meaning they all ended up in exchange as new emails. This had something to do with scalix internal messages not having all headers inserted and imapsync was looking for these headers.
Also special folders could not be "imapsynced", i.e. calendar etc.

PST export/import = hit and miss. in some cases it worked, in others it crashed exporting.

I lost touch with the client so i don't know where it all ended up. Basically there's no all in one tool that i know of which will do it, your going to have a bit of manual work to do unfortunately.

[florian]

We are not aware of specific tools, however there is a 3rd party vendor called GEM that does support Scalix for migrations (we recommend them when moving from Notes or Groupwise TO Scalix) and they claim anywhere-to-anywhere migration, so you may want to check with them. The URL is http://www.gem-si.com/

It's certainly unfortunate to hear that you have to perform such a migration. What's the background?

Florian

[adhodgson]

Hi,

Our management keep pushing us down this route as well, but the project gets denied due to costing issues.

I can sync my Scalix folders via IMAP to an Exchange 2007 server using imapcopy, however, Imapsync doesn't work as you say. Copying of the calendar items is a no go with either Imapcopy or Imapsync.

One product which claims to do the job and I am trying to get the business to buy it if we go down this route is Mail Mover for Scalix:
http://www.mailmover.com/products/MailMover/

I have had no experience with this software, however.

Andrew.

[mnauta]

We are not aware of specific tools, however there is a 3rd party vendor called GEM that does support Scalix for migrations (we recommend them when moving from Notes or Groupwise TO Scalix) and they claim anywhere-to-anywhere migration, so you may want to check with them. The URL is http://www.gem-si.com/

It's certainly unfortunate to hear that you have to perform such a migration. What's the background?

Florian

I am getting the same pressure at my organization. The executives have demanded that their smart phones get email and calendars. I went with Notify link and that is a disaster. Also, server performance is becoming a major issue. I have been given one final chance, so I have just ordered a new server (Proliant , quad processor Xenon, 32Gig memory) Either this will work or my job is gone and they will go to Exchange

Many sleepless nights on my part, it is nerve wrecking.

[mnauta]

I think my troubles are over

here is what did it:
1) new server Proliant , quad processor Xenon, 32Gig memory 10K sas drives
2) 2 gig memory to tomcat http://www.scalix.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11363
3) clear impacache (got the script from the wiki)
4) recreate postgres database

Thanks for all the suggestions I have gotten in various posts on this board.

[mikethebike]

Simpler Webb do a migration tool for Openamil and Samsung Contact. Would think it would also work for Scalix, you would need to ask them.
I used it to migrate several thousand mailboxes.

Mick

[kanderson]

mnauta,

You have a really powerful machine. Just one comment. It's a much longer comment that I had initially expected, but I'll go with it. :)

Scalix is almost never constrained by processor speed, and rarely by Ram when people are reasonable with it (8G is good even for large installs).

Scalix is almost ALWAYS constrained by Disk Speed.

If you're seeing good performance now, that's awesome, ignore my post. But for others seeing performance concerns, get the fastest disks you can find, preferably SAS 15K, and buy lots of them. Build them into a RAID 10 array. With Scalix, RAID 10 will give the best bang for the buck. If you build RAID 5, you will have performance problems on larger installs period. RAID 5 sucks. It's cheaper than RAID 10, but it's slower and less reliable, and brutal during a disk failure recovery.

What that means is that for many people, they can just add a new disk subsystem using something like OpenFiler, which provides iSCSI at no cost other than hardware. In our testing, OpenFiler was consistently and noticeably faster than even locally installed disks, and after over a year now, it's been rock solid. It's a great project, and I'd give it two thumbs up.

SATA disks look great because they're cheap, but they are a disaster with Scalix, and projects built on them will always have performance problems.

For a BIG install, you can improve performance by splitting up the data into multiple RAID 10 arrays. One for /var/opt/scalix/??/postgres, another for /var/opt/scalix/??/s/data. Etc. Put them on seperate controllers, with different disks. There is no benefit to partitioning the same disks in an array differently. This is overkill for most installs though.

Also note that with RAID 10, the more drives you add, the faster it is. So you're better off with 12-75G drives than 4-300G drives. The speed is faster, the failure recovery is faster, the storage is the same. Generally, costs are not too far off, since the smaller drives are much less expensive.

If you need SATA drives, look at the Raptors, since they perform closer to SCSI/SAS. You'll notice that in their cost and capacity too. Do note that they are NOT equal to SCSI/SAS however, as the SATA interface just isn't designed high performance under load.

I would be interested to know how SSD SATA devices compare to SAS, but I don't really have any experience there. My guess is that even though throughput is higher with SSD, once some randomization of read vs write is introduced, SAS will still be faster when both are worked hard. Mostly just due to the SATA interface itself. I'm open to being wrong here though, as I don't really know.

If you can afford it, FiberChannel (optical) will smoke everything else until Infiniband drives are released, but as far as I know, they aren't available yet.

There's a reasonable speed comparison chart here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA ... rnal_buses

Note that as you move from a straight data read to random reads and writes, the transfer speed drops off very fast. A simple example of this would be the performance difference that Windows sees when drives are heavily fragmented. SCSI/SAS handles this better than SATA/IDE, and that is why there is a big performance gap even though many of the specs look as though there shouldn't be.

Kev.

[mikethebike]

Kev,

I had a little chuckle when I read your post...the good old days when I did not have to worry too much about performance kiling my mail system! There were always tweaks I could do to make it run as I wanted if I got into trouble (creating more queue runners etc).

I agree that Scalix (well Openmail and Samsung Contact are the ones I worked with) were very disk intensive in some areas (~data, ~temp, ~user to a lesser extent etc)...compare that to Exchange?
Disk, memory, processer, sun spots, weather...all seem to affect performance...and then the knock on effect of endless OS patches...still, we have twice as many people on the team now

Mick