Quest Migration Manager for Exchange (QMM/EX) has a new agent type, called the Migration Agent for Exchange, or MAgE for short. The new agents work different than the legacy agents in several ways. Here are some quick notes and/or differentiators for how the new MAgE agent operates vs. the the old legacy mail sync agents.
MAgE gets used if you are migrating to Office 365 or Exchange 2013 using QMM/ex. It will support a synchronization mode, which is what this article is about, and a native move mode.
Some points to remember:
- MAgE is multi-threaded, with the default setting of 10, though that can be changed up or down based on how things operate. You can still stack up to 10 agents on a single server as well.
- MAgE sleeps for one minute between runs (by default).
- MAgE performance drops off after stacking more than two agents on the same Agent Host
- MAgE will spend 15 min on a mailbox before moving to the next one. It no longer processes X bytes of mail, it just uses a timer.
- MAgE does NOT write the pr_source_key in the target, but instead tracks source to target in the SQL DB. (This means we have to have good backups of your database).
- The lack of a sync’ed pr_source_key means that it no longer has to delete pre-existing target mailboxes.
- MAgE will not migrate any message that has a total size of > 25 MB. This is a limitation of the API being used.
- You can’t do a full resync on a mailbox that is already switched. You have to unswitch it, resync and switch it. As soon as a workaround for this is determined, I will post that as well..
- No PST’s. A single client reads from the source and writes to the target.
- Target mailboxes are located via target primary SMTP and autodiscover… so autodiscover has to be working on the agent host boxes or it won’t be able to sync.
- The log files are hiding! Look for them on the Agent Host server in the HIDDEN directory of “C:\programdata\quest software\migration agent for exchange\unifiedmailsync”.
These points are mostly from research and questions. I will update this list as I start to use the new agent, which will be in just a few weeks.
