Recently, in our company, we had a power failure dueto UPS malfunction. After restoring everything back to normal, our email system IBM Lotus Domino 8.5.2 (FP2) services failed to start. We also had Symantec for Lotus Domino installed. Its kernel also got panic, and failed to fire up. Few mail boxes were also corrupted and there inbox view disappeared.
Note that we have very big email boxes for many users like 15,20 30GB and mailtracking account crying at 40+GB. After many hours of stress and painful struggling , removing Symantec for mail security, its port configuration in ports section, I was finally able to start the Domino Server and emails start flowing .
When everything got back to normal (except for the Symantec mail security) and many hours downtime dueto R&D, I finally thought to create a DR server for DOMINO so all data should be moved to this DR server, and replace the Production server hardware with newer model of IBM Xseries M4 server.
Following is a complete method on how I migrated my Lotus Domino server to new machine.
SCENARIO:
IBM LOTUS DOMINO PRODUCTION SERVER
OS / APPLICATION
Windows 2008 R2 SP1 installed in OS C: drive
IBM Lotus Domino 8.5.2 FP2 installed in D:\LOTUS
Symantec For Lotus Domino 8.0.9.151 installed at setup default location
HARDWARE
IBM Xseries M2
RAID1 for OS
RAID5 for Lotus Domino Installation & DATA
For migration I followed following steps.
1) Install Windows 2008 R2 SP1 on new machine in C: Drive
2) Run Windows Update
3) Install IBM Lotus Domino 8.5.2 in D:\LOTUS
DO NOT RUN SERVER CONFIGURATION WIZARD . . .
4) Install Domino FP2
5) Install Symantec For Lotus Domino 8.0.9.151 at setup default location
6) Copy notes.ini from Production Domino Server D:\LOTUS\DOMINO\ to this machine at D:\LOTUS\DOMINO
7) STOP DOMINO SERVER AT PRODUCTION SERVER by using quit command in console.
(You can copy data from live server to this DR but chances are high that few mail boxes will require consistency check and possibly few attachments or user inbox view can be corrupted and need to re rebuild by refresh design and fixup. In my case I had the DATA folder in my file server, so I copied it from there.
8) Copy complete DATA folder from Production Domino Server (or File Server if you have backup it to file server) to this machine at D:\LOTUS\DOMINO\ (Overwrite all files).
Please note that DATA folder can be big in size and can take long time for copying as it also contains mail and possibly archive folder which contains users mail files. In my case, DATA folder size was around 400GB and it took around 5-6 hours to copy the whole data.
The DR server was low specs IBM Xseries 3650 refurbished server with RAID5 for DATA .
At production server, I was using IBM Xseries M2 with RAID5 for DATA , and Gigabit connectivity, Copy time can vary as per the network and hardware capacity.
9) Unplug the Production server from LAN.
10) Rename the DR server name with the Production server name and same ip address, same as production domino server. and restart
Upon rebooting, Start the Lotus Domino Server console and monitor all the messages appearing on the screen. It may take some time to start the server because it will first initialize all the LOGs file. In my case it took 20-25 minutes to initialize the server at first time. You can delete un necessary logs file like LOG.NSF to speed up the process.
To be continue . . .
Regard’s
Syed Jahanzaib
Filed under: IBM Related
