Full-Scale Migration

At some point you will have gained sufficient confidence in the results of your tests to start migrating "for real".

The procedure for a "production" migration is basically the same as the test procedure described in Test Migration. Here is a list of issues to be aware of when preparing for production migration:

Disk capacity

The data volumes involved are going to be much larger when you scale up. Make sure you have enough spare disk capacity on both your export and import machines.

Export system cache sizes

Exporting all the content from a publication has the side effect of loading all that content into the Content Engine's caches. So make sure that you don't have any caches that are tuned to have very large maximum sizes, or you may find that after a few hours you have used up all the available system memory, resulting in OutOfMemoryExceptions.

Setting the Interval parameter

During the test period you will have gained some experience with the relationship between the migration tool's Interval parameter, the size of the output files generated by the migration tool, and the amount of time it takes to generate them. You can then set the Interval parameter to whatever value you consider most suitable for your purposes. You can also vary the size of the Interval parameter during the migration process, so that old content is exported in large batches, but that once you get up to the present it is exported in frequent small batches.

Running export/import in parallel

Export and import can run in parallel: you can simply periodically copy or move files from the export folder to the import folder.

Running the systems in parallel

The export/import tools make it feasible to run the old and new systems in parallel during the migration process. Once the new copy of a publication is "complete" - the export/import process has reached the present, it is possible to continue editorial work on the old system, for example, but switch to the new system for publication purposes. Changes made on the old system will be exported once every minute and can be automatically copied to the new system for import.

Automatic copying

If you are intending running the old and new systems in parallel, then you will need to set up scripts for automatically copying files between the export and import folders.

Cross-publishing issues

If your site relies on cross-publishing, then you need to be able to establish relationships between content items in different publications. This means that the single-publication import sequence described in Test Migration must be modified slightly. Instead of importing all the content items in a single publication and then repeating the process, you need to import all the content items in all inter-related publications and then repeat the process.