Day summary
This day is also a weekend, but things went very smooth and quiet in this day compared to the previous…
All I had to do is to run all the other remaining VMs and get the migration going. I also used DMS (Data Migration Services) from G Suite Admin Console to migrate number of IT users (all of IT actually) as we agreed during the migration planning. All work was completed relatively quick… However there was a little change that affected number of users I did not expect!
The customer had about 26 domains or more, they use them all for receiving email, but not all of them are used to send… All the users that were started on CloudMigrator were on a single domain (that’s why I finished quick!), but turned out they will not use that single domain for sending email… They were distributed on multiple … Read the rest “A story of a project: 3600 users to G Suite in 60 days! – Day 5: Going full speed on migration, Users change from domain to domain”
Day summary
This day is a weekend.. Although I put it clear to everyone around me that I never work in weekends.. this was no ordinary time to apply this rule, so we did work on this day!
The main tasks that we needed to accomplish this day was to prepare the migration computers (VMs on GCP), and sorting out the user groups to be migrated (based on domains)..
I started out the work by creating the virtual machines on Google Cloud Platform, and I installed CloudMigrator on each one, having already requested the licenses, I made sure they were available easily on each migration machine, as I was trying to make things simple and getting to anything related to the project easy from every machine.. because I was expecting a big mess to come later on when we start the migrations (and it did indeed come!).. I ended up … Read the rest “A story of a project: 3600 users to G Suite in 60 days! – Day 4: Starting up migration, the NDRs mishap!”
Hello!
This is quite the opposite of where I want to go with my life and this blog.. But it is a critical necessity that I really have to get done with it. I am now studying for my CCNA certification.. Following it will be CCNP and MCSE Messaging!
It is going to be very busy next weeks/months, but I’m planning to push as hard as I can and get all things done really quick.. Because I still got a PMP thing to do!
So, about the first step, CCNA I’ll share my notes and thoughts about the points and topics that I come across while I study.. I will also share my ideas of labs and setups that I did/will do and what benefits I got out of them.
Hope this end up quick and that I move to the next objective
This is just a technical note to myself actually and anyone who might find it useful…
As I have done the unexpected and now preparing for my CCNA certification (I’ll explain in another post soon), I tend to go with the approach that if I want to learn something, I should teach it to others.. So this post is part of this approach…
In easy steps, if you want to configure new Cisco router form the beginning, you should follow this approach:
- Configure router general settings
- Hostname, clock, terminal history size, DNS settings (name, IP, domain name)
- RSA key generation
- SSH settings
- services password encryption command
- Create enable secret, and create yourself a username
- Configure interfaces
- Configure whatever routing protocols/static routes you have
And this should be it, nothing complicated if you know your scenario and setup, and most important, you understand the logic the network is going to work … Read the rest “Logical steps to configure Cisco routers”
Day summary
So we ended the previous day with a lot of things done, in fact the day ended while we still had a lot on our list of unfinished work, so we were all eager to start the next day to finish the pending work.
In this day, we had to complete the user sync setup between active directory and Google. Before going into the details about this, I need to explain how we ended up dividing users to groups and the criteria we categorized users on.
Looking at the customer’s total data sizes, it was about 31TB of email messages. Of this 31TB there were 14TB used by about 450 users only. Those users started from 20GB per-mailbox up to 50GB… The remaining 17TB was distributed among the remaining 3000 users.
Because we had very little time, we thought that 45% of data can be done easy enough … Read the rest “A story of a project: 3600 users to G Suite in 60 days! – Day 3: More manual work!”
Hey everyonee,
I just wanted to put this out, that I am working on rebranding the blog to a new title and along it will be new direction… I will restructure the categories and pages to fit the new direction, and I’ll start working on getting more online presence!
My career is shaping more clear now, and I am finally getting close to go into the clear line of project management…
I’ll be working to get a new URL and maybe a new domain completely, the current URL will keep working as normal, I’ll configure redirection to keep the flow coming…
Day summary
This day was all about the directory and password sync tools… We wanted to finalize their configuration to allow the support team the time for demonstrations and practices before going out to users and change their profiles…
We started out by working on GCDS, once we started working on the tool, we were faced with two critical problems:
- Turned out the current number of licenses on the G Suite Admin Console is less than the actual number of users and less than what the customer has approved.
- The OU that the customer wanted to sync was including disabled users, service accounts and a lot of user accounts with their ‘mail’ attribute value is wrong (it contained spaces in the beginning and end of the field).
We started out working on the second problem, since it is more visible to us and we knew what to do to fix … Read the rest “A story of a project: 3600 users to G Suite in 60 days! – Day 2: Getting things warmer”
Day summary
We started the project with a technical workshop with the customer IT teams. They had 2 teams working on this: infrastructure and hosting team, and the end-user support team. We divided ourselves into two teams as well, I went with the infrastructure team, and we sent 2 guys to help the support team making their plans, guides, and process to start working on users.
Our initial plan was to start users data migration as soon as possible, first we need to get an idea about the distribution of sizes, and then we will sort out the largest mailboxes and do the migration for them at first, our idea was since we have limited time and we have a risk of losing access to the old service once the subscription is over, we at least have the bulk of the data migrated… Among the group of the large mailboxes, … Read the rest “A story of a project: 3600 users to G Suite in 60 days! – Day 1: Starting up”
Before going into this post, I would like to give a brief summary about what I do… I am a Sr. Systems Engineer, I have worked on many products and technologies… In the past 3 years I’ve been working with Google technologies mainly on G Suite (former Google Apps for Work), and it was a great experience I can never thank God for allowing me to be in this place, now this is not the time to talk about what I managed to get/learn from my work… but I’ll do that soon!
In addition to my knowledge, I’ve been writing code since 2 decades and maybe more. Since the days of VB5, I was just a kid in elementary school, I started out by helping my uncle designing interfaces for his freelance work at that time (mid 90s). And I fell in love with coding and programing,… Since that time … Read the rest “I took a challenge I never expected myself to take before!”
So we recently won a really great project… 3600 users on Office 365 to G Suite, the IT team of the customer were very convinced and willing to change, however the time frame we got for the whole project was somehow ‘tight’…
I’ve done pre-sales part on this project, and we originally started with them on a POC where two of their IT members migrated their data and created forwarding from Office 365 to G Suite. Then the testing circle slowly expanded to include their CIO.
Once we got the IT’s satisfaction, the CIO submitted his report to the board. They needed one week to make the decision and we won the deal.
Turns out that after sitting with CIO after the approval that we have only 75 days 60 days to finish the whole project. Their subscription will expire and they will not renew, and they already sent the … Read the rest “A story of a project: 3600 users to G Suite in 60 days!”