File Server Migration to SAN:

This can be used in conjuntion with P2Ving a server where you want the C drive on the VMFS volume and the data drives on RDM volumes, or it can just be used to migrate internal storage to SAN storage. You could also use it to migrate from one SAN to another, but there may be better tools for that.

1. Mount new SAN volume to server, give it a drive letter and format it
2. Copy data from source drive to target drive using Robocopy. Create a .bat file with the following line in it:
'robocopy /XO /R:5 /W:5 /E /ZB /FP G:\ Z:\"

where....
/XO Excludes Older files.
/R:5 Retry 5 times.
/W:5 Wait 5 seconds between retries.
/copyall copies data, timestamp, attributes, ownership, auditing, and NTFS ACLs.
/E Copies all subdirectories (including empty ones).
/ZB Tries to copy files in restartable mode, but if that fails with an "Access Denied" error, switches automatically to Backup mode.
/FP Displays full pathnames of files in the output.
G:\ = source drive
Z:\ = target drive

NOTE: If you execute the .bat file by command line, the screen will stay up.

NOTE: If you want the screen to stay up (which you should) and you want to be able to just double-click the .bat file to execute, make sure you put a pause command at the end of the .bat file.

NOTE: The backslashes at the end of the source and target drives are important - without them, the subfolders won't get copied.

3. After execution of the Robocopy bat file, verify all the data has been copied by viewing the properties of each drive - check the # of files and size.

NOTE: Review the Robocopy results screen and look for failures.  It will often be necessary to re-run the Robocopy bat file.

4. Once all data has been successfully transferred to the new drive, we'll need to get all file shares transferred.  Internally, Windows ties a file share to a drive.  So, we will rename the drive and restart Windows to get this to take effect.

NOTE:  We will need to restart Windows 2 x for this procedure.  First to free up the drive letter of the existing source and another to force Windows to reestablish the shares after you rename the new volume to the appropriate drive letter.  So, onto renaming drive letters....

5. Change the drive letter of the existing drive with shares on it to an unused drive letter.  You will probably need to reboot the machine after this in order to free that drive letter up for use again.

6. Restart Windows.

7. Change the drive letter of the new disk (to which you just copied all the files) to the drive letter that you just free'ed up.

EXAMPLE:  If you currently have shared folders on the E:\ drive and you're copying data to the new SAN volume (let's say you named that drive F:\), you'll want to rename E:\ to G:\, reboot the server to free up the letter E in available drive letters, change the F:\ to E:\ and then reboot again so Windows will assign the shares.  Once this is done, you should be able to browse the E:\ drive (which is now representing the SAN volume) and see all the shares.

8. Have end users verify the shares just to be safe.

You have successfully migrated all the file storage to the SAN.  Now you can start taking advantage of advanced SAN features such as Replication and Snapshots.