Web Deployment Tool (MS Deploy)

Re: How long does this take in the "Real World"?

wilddoktor — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:11:00 GMT

Thanks for the quick reply, moshaikh!

So from reading your post, my mind went here:

1. there wil be pre-migration tasks to setup; that will take time

2. the migration itself will vary in time depending mostly on amount of content, plus ACLs, ip changes, etc. Regardless, this time is just "waiting" time for the human doing the migration.

3. post migration clean up will also take time

4. there's always the possibility that something will go wrong, and the iis7 config will need to be reset to the last backup.

So the next question is: of those 5 - 6 hours, how do you see the time breaking down? Or do those 5 - 6 hours just take up the 2nd step...the actual moving of bits and bytes?

I'm envisioning moving 5 or 10 sites at a time, since the client wants minimum downtime. Which makes me think: at what point will the sites actually be "down"? Will the original sites go down when the actual moving of bits begins? Or will it go down when the ip changes on the iis7 box? Or do you have to disable the ip on the iis6 box before the migration?

You opened up a can with your answer, I want you to know... :-)

Re: How long does this take in the "Real World"?

moshaikh — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:51:58 GMT

In our regular test runs we carry out migration of about 20 sites with 600 MB of content and about 6000 sites with very minimal content. The entire migration takes about 5 - 6 hours.

During the process of migration you can change the ip address and other tweaking as part of the run using replace rules and setParam.

It will depend on how much content these 50 sites have and what are the other changes you are planning to do apart from the webserver migration such as virtual directory changes, ip changes, carry over ACLS etc.

Let us know if I can help you in any way.

How long does this take in the "Real World"?

wilddoktor — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:51:52 GMT

Hi everybody; hope your Saturday is going well!

My question is to those of you who have *actually* done a website migration from IIS6 / 2003 to IIS7 / 2008. No theroy here, please!

My client is a small webhost, has a couple of 2003 boxes with about 50 (total on both boxes) websites. Different IPs, certificates, etc.

Here's the question: How long would it take *for somebody who has done this before* to move all these sites from both boxes to a new 2008 / IIS7 box, do all the post-migration clean up, and have them up and running again?

The reason for the question: I messed with IIS5 a long time ago when I was an enterprise network geek, but haven't touched 6 or 7. I'm now a SMB MSP geek, and the above client wants their websites moved. I want to say "of course I can do this!", but I've never done it before...and I'm not gonna lie about it.

So over the last 4 days I have done mega research (found this site, too!) and am pretty comfortable with msdeploy and some of the gotcha's involved. So, in theory I'm very confident that I can do this for my client.

In reality, I have no idea how long it will take.

So, if some of you that have actually done this can chime in with how long it would take YOU to do it, I will then add an appropriate amount of time to guess how long it will take ME. :-)

Thanks in advance for your replies! I'm needing to come up with a plan in the next few hours, so any quick replies would be appreciated.

(BTW, I've been in contact with Faith, and she's awesome...has given me a *ton* of useful tech info about this stuff, which is mostly the reason for my confidence.)

Bill
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