GroupWise migration and downtime

On Saturday, check the status of the migration live!
We will be posting updates to the Technology Discussion Forum at community.drew.edu throughout Saturday afternoon. Check here to learn when your Post Office is going offline and when it will be back.

Computing and Network Services is in the process of migrating the GroupWise system to new server hardware as part of our routine replacement cycle for equipment. In order to complete the migration, there will be two periods of time when GroupWise services will be unavailable:

GroupWise Messenger and IMAP access - Wednesday 10 December 5:00-6:00pm:

During this time GroupWise Instant Messenger will be unavailable. In addition to moving Messenger to new hardware, it will also be updated to the latest version. When starting Messenger for the first time after the migration, you may be prompted to update the Messenger software on your computer. The update will require less than five minutes to complete on most computers.

In addition to Messenger, we will also be migrating the GroupWise IMAP server at this time. Users of an unsupported email client, such as Mozilla Thunderbird or Apple Mail, will be impacted by this downtime. There will be no impact for users of the standard GroupWise Client or WebAccess.
All GroupWise Post Offices - Saturday 20 December starting at 12:00 pm throughout the afternoon

We will be migrating the GroupWise Post Offices during the afternoon of December 20th. Due to the large volume of email data that needs to be moved, we project that the migration will require the majority of the afternoon and early evening. During this time, all access to the GroupWise system will be unavailable.

We will be migrating the employee post office first, followed by the two student post offices.

Will I notice any changes after the migration?

We expect to see a slight performance increase as a result of the new hardware. Other than a possible performance increase, GroupWise will function exactly as before.

Why is GroupWise being moved?

Computing and Network Services maintains all equipment used for critical University business on a replacement cycle. The GroupWise servers, which were installed three years ago, have reached the end of their warranty coverage period and are due for replacement. We will also be taking the opportunity to consolidate the GroupWise servers onto fewer physical machines using server virtualization technology. After the migration, GroupWise services will use less than half the number of physical servers they use now, and consequently over 50% less electrical power and air conditioning capacity will be required to maintain the email system.

GroupWise is not the first service to be virtualized at Drew. In fact, the majority of our services take advantage of the increased efficiency, higher availability, reduced maintenance, and power savings of virtualization technology. The GroupWise servers will be joining 60 other servers that have been consolidated onto only 5 physical machines using virtualization technology.

Why is so much downtime required?

In addition to moving GroupWise to new hardware, we are also changing the server operating system from Novell NetWare to Linux. Novell has announced the end-of-life for the NetWare operating system and future developments of GroupWise and other Novell technologies will be occurring on the Linux operating system. This type of migration cannot be performed while the system is online. The email data must be copied to new volumes. Due to the large amount of email stored on our post offices, this process will require some time.

The majority of the post office data will be copied while the system is online Thursday and Friday before the migration. On Saturday afternoon, we will only be moving the changes. Nevertheless, we project this process will require at least two hours per post office.

Thank you for your patience and cooperation. Please don't hesitate to contact us with any questions or concerns.

08 Dec 2008
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