Hi

The US BB lists are full of the 'migration' issue - a typical example
follows.

rgds

simonf

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Simon Fitzpatrick
eLearning Consultant
E: [log in to unmask]
W: www.learn2elearn.co.uk
M: 07729-137500
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At Seneca, we have completed two test migrations at this point and will
be going ahead with our migrations to Blackboard 6.0 at the end of this
week.  I apologize if it's too much information but I'm going to get
into details here for System Admins because this is what I would request
from anyone else posting.

Here at Seneca, we have a development environment where our faculty
create their courses and a production environment where courses,
enrollments, students, instructors and teacher assignments are
completely automated.  We don't do anything manually except for
Organizations and extreme exceptions.  This helps us keep down to one
Blackboard Administrator and me, the guy who architects it, installs it
and makes sure it works well.

We are currently at Blackboard 5.6 Build 168 Level 3 on Solaris.  We
have successfully completed both migrations where the larger of the two
failed but we were able to recover with Blackboard's help.

We ran test migrations on a number of servers to ensure both of our
migrations would work where we took similarly configured servers and
duplicated our development and production environments, then migrated
them to other servers which will remain for our new production
environment.

Some stats about our migrations are listed below.  I hope it's not too
confusing.

Development server:
================

Users: 1,339
Courses created: 598
Courses with content: 598
Content directory size: 5.6 GB
Enrollments:  1 to 5 courses per faculty member.  Many more for our
content creators.


Test Development server source:
- Single Sun E420R server with Blackboard 5.6 and Oracle 8i database on
the same server
- 2 GB memory/4 CPU's

Test Development server destination:
- Single Sun Netra server with Blackboard 5.6 and Oracle 8i database on
the same server
- 2 GB memory/1 CPU

Migration: First time, our test migration took 6 hours and completed
successfully.

Issues: A single important issue arose out of this migration because we
went over this one in detail to ensure that migration was successful and
complete.  Assessments did not migrate properly.  It seems that
assessments did not go over as assessment links but rather as course
links.  In essence, migrated assessments did not have the appropriate
setting available to them (because they thought they were courses
documents) and they were not available in the Test manager.  There was a
number of issues that this raised in conjunction with their courses
document status.

Resolution:  Blackboard support gave us and ran a script for us that
made these migrated assessments available in the Test manager.  What I
believe is required is a fix to the migration script so that assessments
go over properly in the first place.  Blackboard is working on this and
will have a solution shortly for our production migration.

Snapshot test:

We also performed a snapshot/bridge test to ensure that the old Level 3
functionality would work as expected.  A couple of things popped up
here.  First off, check the new documentation because minor things have
changed.  This may be useful to those institutions that create their own
snapshot data.
- the date format changed so the footer needs to be changed and any
fields that have a date too.
- the header line is no longer used, just a list of fields that are
present.
- minor field changes and values.  Read the docs for this and check
carefully.
- we had to recreate our snapshot scripts because the command-line
syntax has changed due to virtual installations.
- it used to be called bridge.sh, now it's snapshot.sh.

Issue:  The snapshot ran successfully but we thought we had a problem
because we create all of our courses "Unavailable".  We leave it up to
instructors to make the courses available when they are ready.  On first
glance, any role besides "Sys Admin" could not get into these
Unavailable courses.   It turns out that if you have "Edit personal
Information" turned off in the User privileges section, this is what
happens.  We had this turned off because our data all comes through the
snapshot.  Turning this on cured it.

Resolution:  Blackboard is looking into fixing this.  For now, we can
move ahead but this fix is required for our production server.

Plan of action:  Our strategy for our smaller development server
migration is to copy our Bb 5.6
(completely intact) to a separate "layover" server, install Bb 6.0 on
our development server and then migrate back to our original development
server.  The "layover" server will be held for a couple of weeks after
our production migration is complete and we're happy with it as our
back-out strategy.

Timeframe for real migration:  This Friday December 13, 2002 (Friday the
13th?  DOH! )  1 day scheduled downtime.

Production server:
==============
Users: 76,575
Courses created: 25,497
Courses with content: 3,302
Content directory size: 23.7 GB
Enrollments:  usually 4 or 5 courses per student and the same number for
faculty.

Test Production server source:
- Bb 5.6 web - Sun E420R with 4GB memory and 4 CPU's
- Bb 5.6 Db   - Sun E420R with 1GB memory and 4 CPU's
Test Production server destination:
- Bb 6.0 web - Sun E480 with 4 GB memory and 2 CPU's
- Bb 6.0 Db   - Sun E480 with 4 GB memory and 2 CPU's

Migration: First time, our test migration took 11 hours and stopped.  We
had an issue noted below and resolved and continued.  The complete
migration took approximately 90 hours.  The database portion took 67
hours to complete and the course copy took 23 hours to complete.  We did
this over NFS, as the migration script supports.  Various settings have
to set back.  This was not taken into account for the migration time
required.

Issues:  It stopped 11 hours in.  After much database tweaking on the
destination server, it was determined that the source database needed
tweaking.  Bigger temp table space, a bigger sort area size and extent
sizes got us going.

Resolution:  Blackboard suggested this fix after various fixes were
attempted by lower level support.

Plan of action: Our larger migration will involve two sets of servers.
As our DB server is not changing, we'll be copying this data to a source
"layover" db server and use this with our source web server to migrate
to the new destination web server/old DB server.  The 5.6 servers will
be held until the first couple of weeks of classes, then all servers can
go back to their regularly assigned duties.  We know it will take 4 or 5
days due to some activity at this time of the semester.  Major snapshot
data will be help until after the migration and then run.  We will
continue to run our snapshot on our "layover" 5.6 servers as a backout
plan, so that either one can be turned on at start of classes.

Timeframe for real migration:  December 18, 2002.  10 days scheduled
downtime.

The final environment for our production will be three Sun 480 web
servers fronting our Sun Oracle db server on a fibre-channel SAN.  This
will be put in place for January, or failing that, we stuff a 480 with
as much as it will take and continue to work on the SAN route.

This, of course, is a small portion of the actual upgrade. Other things
required:
- documentation
- Helpdesk training
- Mentor training
- Faculty Training
- Tip sheets
- marketing (posters, newsletters, etc.)
- portal module migration
- a whole bunch of other stuff that's in my project Gantt chart that I
can't remember at the moment.

Already done are:
- beta testing (Thanks Blackboard)
- committee/workgroup presentations and acceptance
- roadshows for what's new
- snapshot changes
- portal committee recommendations accepted
- MySeneca workgroup discussion of pros/cons
- hardware acquisition

Although this should have worked flawlessly in the first place, I must
thank our CRM, Katherine Kerxton, for being instrumental in escalating
our issues which sound like they may be issues for others as well.  Her
persistence and attitude and Tech Support's (and others) patience and
skill are much appreciated.

I hope this helps.  If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to
contact me.

Santo Nucifora
Manager, Systems Development and Innovation
Seneca College  Toronto, Ontario, CANADA
416.491.5050 x2190
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