Binary Tree's Good Migrations Blog Tags

Renaming a Domino Server Using Domino Consolidator

Posted by Perry Hiltz, Solutions Architect

Today's blog post was originally posted on June 21, 2011 on Perry Hiltz's wildly popular blog, Domino Diversions. As most of you may know, Perry is a Solutions Architect at Binary Tree and a long-time IBM Domino solutions expert. Today, Perry is heavily involved in the success of Binary Tree's pre-sales, technical, and support teams, and focuses primarily on educating and supporting customers during their Microsoft Exchange migrations.

The thought of renaming a Domino Server is a daunting task at best. There are innumerable considerations to address when undertaking this task. There is the server security, groups, connection documents, mail-in-databases, access control lists, and not to mention the user desktop icons. As I continue to work with various organizations, the thought of Domino server virtual clustering has proven to be a way to simplify some of these processes.

The concept entails an Enterprise version of Domino. The administrator will still need to register a new server in the Address book. This will be the new name of the server. Then the next step is to create a cluster with the old server name, then the new server name. Once the cluster directory and cluster replicator tasks are initiated, the cluster directory database will contain cluster information for only the old server.

The next step involves the creation of agents to scan all ACL’s to add the new server entry. Beware of roles, the agents will likely not associate the new server listing with any roles the old server had. Then connection documents to and from the old server need to be copied, and modified to use the new server name. Similarly group membership of the old server will require the new server to be added. Next will be to copy and paste, then modify all of the mail-in-database names. This will need to reflect the new server name. Once all of these aspects are in place, then the server’s Notes.ini can be modified to use the new server ID file for serverid= and keyidfile= to use the new server ID file.

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Posted on 7/28/2011 9:30:00 AM | with 0 comments

Minimizing & Simplifying Your Domino Infrastructure Costs

Posted by Perry Hiltz, Solutions Architect

Before I joined BinaryTree, I worked for a German based chemical company as one of two Domino Administrators responsible for 40 distributed Domino servers and over 3,500 users. Our configuration consisted of five different Domino domains in North America. We agreed - with management’s buy in – to the idea of consolidating these five domains into a single domain. After many long discussions with our parent company and a final agreement to use this new domain as the basis for a single Global Domain (we had 43 domains total), we began building out our infrastructure. Our goal was to centralize all mail into two sets of clustered servers across two AS/400's.

With our infrastructure in place, we began devising a plan to start manually moving users. We developed a well-defined checklist of 35 different key checkpoints that needed to be accomplished in order to achieve our goal. As the objective was to use local field staff to complete this process, we handed the user move and desktop updates over to field services. We had really good people doing this job, but not all field engineers followed our checkpoints list completely, nor did they follow it in the proper sequence every time. With this manual domain migration approach, when a problem arose, we spent 2-3 hours with the field engineer or the end user trying to resolve the problem. It was a very time consuming and highly inefficient process.

There had to be a better way!

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Posted on 2/9/2011 9:15:00 AM | with 0 comments