Enterprise Vault x86 to x64 Cutover

We successfully completed an Enterprise Vault 9.0 cut-over last night at one of our clients. We migrated the EV 9 server  from x86 based hardware to x64. The source and target systems are both VMware virtual machines. It's certainly a process that requires a lot of preparation; especially double-checking each and every task at hand.

First and foremost, we backed up the source system prior to the migration. The source was running Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition; the target was running Server 2008 R2. We performed a base installation of EV 9 on the target server but did not execute the EV Configuration Wizard after the installation. This needed to take place after the data was migrated.

Once we had everything backed up and ready to go, we shutdown the source system. The EV Data and Indexes were on their own VMDK. The next step was basically to add this VMDK as a disk in the target system. So we went through the process of adding an existing virtual disk to the target server. Once that was done, we opened Disk Management on the Server 2008 R2 target system and added the disk.

With the source server shutdown, we renamed the target server the same name as the source and joined it to the AD domain. After the reboot, we executed the Configuration Wizard for EV and everything came back online immediately.

During the post migration tasks we had to get backups configured for EV which requires having customized EV scripts run prior to backup which places the EV Site and Indexes in "backup mode." The EV scripts are designed to run in the x86 version of PowerShell in Windows Server 2008. So we had to make adjustments in the scripts to point to the x86 version of PowerShell. So the scripts had to point to "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe". Once this was completed, we executed the Avamar backup with the custom scripts and backup started and completed without any issues.

At the end of the day, we had a successful migration of EV 9 to 64-bit. Next step is upgrade to EV 10.