SmartCloud Onboarding By Rob Kirkland

Transcription

1 PEOPLE ORGANIZATION TECHNOLOGY SmartCloud Onboarding By Rob Kirkland RockTeam Senior Solutions Consultant & Instructor Your go-to partner for IBM Collaboration Solutions

2 SmartCloud Onboarding BoF at IBM Connect 2014 At IBM Connect 2014 in January, RockTeam sponsored and conducted the IBM SmartCloud Onboarding BoF. The BoF was aimed at certified SmartCloud Onboarding specialists and the companies that hire them to facilitate their migration to Smart- Cloud. The Onboarding specialists have been certified in the process of setting up the hybrid Notes environment, setting up the staging server that hosts the applications that insure a smooth mail file migration, and the actual migration of user mail databases from on-premises mail servers to in-cloud mail servers. This white paper includes some of the tips, tricks, etc., that were shared at the BoF. Memo Configuration Tool Consider using the Memo Configuration tool in the OPT database to create messages to be sent periodically to new SmartCloud users for purposes such as: Introducing various features of SmartCloud one-by-one. Highlighting the values of various features of SmartCloud. Sending links to users for learning and help resources. Rationale: IBM has been offering pricing deals to customers who move to IBM SmartCloud Notes and also buy IBM SmartCloud Engage. There have been some good deals, leading some organizations to buy the package without perhaps having a fully realized conception of what the tools that they have bought can do for them, of what the potential benefits are of SmartCloud Engage, or of how they are going to introduce the new product to their users and insure that their users adopt it and gain the promised benefits. So as a proactive Onboarding specialist, one looks for ways to help the client achieve these goals. The Memo Configuration tool is a powerful tool that could aid in this effort. Preparing the Onboarding Environment Preparing the Onboarding environment is no easy feat. You have to set up a at least two and as many as four new Domino servers and configure everything just right. The documentation for doing this is not perfect and not always at your fingertips. The process is complicated further by the fact that every customer's Domino configuration is unique and many of them haven't been well designed, well maintained, or well documented. Here are some common pitfalls to avoid: Check the Access Server field of server documents in the production domain. If it is not blank, make sure the staging server is added to it. Add the staging server to the Trusted Servers field of all mail and directory servers.

3 Check the ACL of the Domino Directory in the production domain. Look to see if "Enforce a Consistent ACL across all replicas" is checked. If it is, verify that all servers in the production domain have identical copies of the ACL. If any do not, their Domino directories have not been replicating properly and are probably not in sync with those on the standard servers. You need to either remedy that problem by correcting their ACLs or remove the nonstandard servers from the list of servers that OPT generates on its initial scan of the production domain's directory. Otherwise your directory and mail scans are likely to fail at least partially. You risk spending a lot of time troubleshooting the problem. If server documents list IP addresses in the Net Address field on the Ports, Notes Network Ports page, encourage the administrator to use host names instead. If local IP addresses are used, especially in the passthru server document(s), the domain configuration tool that sets up your hybrid environment may substitute an incorrect IP address in the Server document, which will result in passthru failures. You can manually correct the erroneously changed IP address and everything will work correctly again. But the IP address is a trap that waits to be sprung again the next time someone runs the domain configuration tool. On that day, you will be long gone, having moved on to your next assignment, but passthru will stop working, directories will stop syncing, and mail will stop transferring between on-premises and in-cloud mail servers. If the server documents used host names instead, this problem would never arise. Customers who have multiple Domino domains have an especially tricky environment to configure. Prepare to spend a lot more time configuring and troubleshooting such an environment than you would a single domain environment. Among other things, all domains will share one (or two) passthru servers, but each domain will need its own staging server. Multiple staging servers. We had one customer with mail servers situated all over the world who wanted to set up regional staging servers. This can be done, but you will have to change the standard configuration, then compensate for that change at run time. When you only have one staging server, you set up a mail-in database document that points to the OTT database, which then receives a message from each fully provisioned user and automatically kicks off the Administration Process Delete Mail Database procedure. When you have multiple staging servers you have to hand roll a way to get those message to the correct OTT database. Or you have to manually delete newly provisioned usders' on-premises mail databases. Setting Up the OPT Database This database gathers data about users and their mail databases. It flags known issues so that you can remedy them. It provides tools for determining which users should or should not be migrated together. Before your first scan of the domain from the OPT database, review the Domain Name field in all Person documents and make them case-consistent. If domain names in Person documents are not case-consistent, OPT will interpret them as different domains and you'll find yourself having to separate users into batches according to the case of the domain names in their Person documents. For example, RockTeam, RockTeam, rockteam and ROCKTEAM would be treated as four different domains by OPT. Edit Person documents to make them all the same. If a mail server scan fails to generate a Mail Statistics document in OPT for a known mail user,

4 try scanning for orphans. If the user turns up as an orphan, look for a replica of the user's mail database on some domain server other than the user's mail server or its clustermate(s). If any such copy of a mail database exists, OPT treats it and its mail user as an orphan. To correct the situation, delete the orphan copy of the database. Setting Up the OTT Database This database imports defined batches of users from the OPT database. It also provides tools for creating a local replica of each user's mail database, and then populating and encrypting the local replica for transport to IBM SmartCloud. When creating a Control Document, make sure you reserve at least as much disk space on the IBM SmartCloud ftp server as OTT thinks the mail databases in the batch occupy. Failure to do this will cause the ftp server to stop transferring databases when the reserved amount of bytes has been transferred. Any databases that fail to be transferred as a result will have to be rebatched in the OPT database and their migration started over from scratch. If you anticipate migrating a large number of mail databases, considering enabling scheduled running of some of the agents that process mail files. That way you can move databases along the assembly line without having to manually initiate every action. Don't run unread-sync against mail databases that originate on more than one mail server during any single run. Unread-sync will crash. Configure the FTP Client Configure the ftp client to minimize timeouts and maximize retry events. Otherwise you risk coming to work Monday morning only to discover that the ftp client stalled late Friday night and didn't transfer any further files after that, but instead waited all weekend for you to re-enter your password (or some such stupid thing). Import and Provisioning Mail database importation and user provisioning take place on IBM SmartCloud servers after you declare that all mail files in a given batch have either been successfully transferred to IBM's ftp server or their transfer has been cancelled. The databases must be decrypted and virus scanned, then they can be transferred to the in-cloud mail servers where they will thereafter reside. The certified onboarding specialist initiates these procedures then monitors them. Despite your meticulous planning and careful processing, it is not uncommon for one or more mail databases to fail one or more of these procedures. If they do, your two recourses are to cancel and start over from scratch or to open a PMR and hope that the SmartCloud Support team will be able to correct the condition that is blocking import/provisioning. Each failure will generate one or more error messages that you can use to determine the cause of the failure and, with that knowledge, whether you should restart or open a PMR.

5 After the Process Long after the hybrid Notes environment has been correctly configured, all mail databases have been migrated, the staging server has been retired, and the onboarding specialist has moved on, things can break. I previously mentioned the potential trap that using IP addresses in the Net Address fields of server documents can pose. Change IP addresses to host names. The network configuration tool creates and populates a series of Group documents that facilitate passthru data transfer. These auto-created Group documents have warnings on them not to edit them manually. Doing so will cause intermittent mail routing and directory synchronization failures. But sooner or later someone will ignore the warnings and edit the Members field of one of these Group documents. Therefore, it is considered a Best Practice for the Notes administrator to run the configuration test tool periodically to verify that everything continues to be correctly configured, and to re-run the domain configuration tool to correct the problems when a configuration test fails. The Notes mail database migration procedure is complex and often painful. But the benefits at the end of the process are tremendous. A knowledgeable and proactive onboarding specialist can both ease the pain and help the customer to more effectively and fully realize the benefits of the end result.to begin: RockTeam can help you successfully deploy SmartCloud engage by providing: Licensing don t forget IBM offers great financial advantages to adding SmartCloud capacity at the time of Domino renewal. Project planning Migration Training events and materials Win with SmartCloud Rob Kirkland Senior Solutions Consultant & Instructor rob.kirkland@rockteam.com office: direct: PEOPLE ORGANIZATION TECHNOLOGY Your go-to partner for IBM Collaboration Solutions Copyright 2014 Rockey & Associates, Inc. (aka The RockTeam). Logos and trademarks are property of their respective owners.