How reliable is NetWare's Migration Wizard 6??

[benbeneke]

Hi All,

I have 3 NW 4.11 servers in the same tree. 1 for main file and print, 1 for GW5.2 email and 1 running Border manager 2.1.

I need to upgrade the file and print NW4.11 server to NW 6 and move it on to a new IBM X235 box.

The original NW4.11 box does not meet requirements for an in place upgrade.

How reliable/succesful is Novell's NetWare Migration Wizard 6 when migrating from 4.11 to 6 in one step.

If it is a reliable method what issues are there, pre and post migration, with the 2 remaining NW4.11 boxes co-existing in the same tree as the newly migrated NW6 box? I obviously cannot have a loss of email service etc.

Do I need to update anything and/or extend schema etc on the remaining 4.11 boxes to achieve this integration? All my 4.11 boxes are running SP9, DS 6.21 and dsrepair 4.73a which, as I understand, it should allow them to co-exist with NW6.

Any help and advice appreciatted please as I need to do this upgrade urgently.

Regards

Ben

 

[lerdalt]

Probably the best tips will be found on Novell's knowledgebase. In our environment for the first server we migrated (replacing hardware with the os upgrade), we started with the server that holds the master of the [ROOT] partition. We did a migrate from NetWare 5.1 on the old server to NetWare 5.1 on the new server then did an in-place upgrade to NetWare 6.

I know this added a step, but we ended up with a couple of points where we could recover with little to know issues. If the migration failed we had the original server then if the in-place were to fail, we still had the orginal server we could restore NDS to and be backup and running in relatively short order.

The migration wizard has always run well for me. Couple of things that may help:
-Run source server, destination server, and pc with migration wizard at lowest common speed. We've had the best file copy times by running across a 10mbps hub.
-Be patient, the file copy will take some time and depending on the number of objects in the partiton that are moving, the NDS copies can take some time as well.
-Bring the destination server up, and set it to reference the source server for time. Or set both the destination and source servers to the same NTP time source. Time should be synchronized on both servers.