A few thoughts about SCR target activation

I recently activated an SCR target as part of adding a mailbox server to remote office. I couldn't find much on the web about how long the activation would take, or what if any effect SCR activation would have on BES. All clients are outlook 2007, so i knew autodiscover would take care of the mailbox move. I used the activation procedure found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738132(EXCHG.80).aspx

First, on the time to failover to SCR (or activate SCR target)

1. I used a target DB with the same log file prefix (E04 in my case) so i wouldn't have to mess with eseutil or worry about the DB being in a clean shutdown state (the mount-database operation would clear up a dirty shutdown with matching prefixes). I would suggest this if you have the ability to do so as it allows you to skip several potentially time consuming steps.

2. The resume-storagegroupcopy cmdlet took about 7 minutes to complete. There were 0 logs in the copy queue and 50 in the replay queue (kept with the defaults when setting up SCR).

3. I manually replicated AD after the move-storagegroup path, again after move-databasepath and again after move-mailbox, this might have been overkill, but with our site repl at 120 minutes, i didn't mind a little over kill. This added about 10 minutes to the process.

4. The move-mailbox -configuration only went extremely fast; 50 mailboxes in less than 5 seconds.

5. The mount-database was also extremely fast, but i would assume that is b/c it was in a clean shutdown state, it may take a little longer with a dirty db shutdown.

overall, the process took me less than 20 minutes of downtime, then add another 10 of bes downtime when i realized i had forgotten to give the BESadmin account the necessary permissions on the mailbox server.