NYC HHC is a network of 11 community hospitals
http://nyc.gov/hhc
The Challenge
A project like this is complex for several reasons. Their massive SharePoint farm(s) system included dozens of content databases and hundreds of sites, which all needed to be migrated to the newer version without losing critical data. Knowing the complexity of the project they were undertaking, SimpleSharepoint worked with HHCs to collaborate on timelines that made sense for everyone. The Application Services Team at SimpleSharepoint sent weekly updates to HHC, keeping the eight hospitals involved and informed of progress and next steps throughout the project.
As is often the case with SharePoint, they had each grown organically, applying individual policies and database management techniques. It was decided for the long-term it would be wise to move to a centralized management farm. Our challenge was to evaluate all the separate farms, remediate them from extraneous third-party tools, and / or database issues, and prepare them all for migration to one large centralized farm. We built dozens of interim farms and a very large production farm.
What We Did
What we initially did was evaluate each of the for third-party web components, .NET code, patch levels, and database(s) health. We then created a pre-migration consolidation matrix. Because all 2007 farms were all in production it was imperative that no outages occur. What we did was build a mirror of all these 2007 farms in a centralized location and we worked out a system where SharePoint admins (with our help as needed) copied their databases to this central location for testing. This 2007 testing farm then became our location for continuing remediation of the 2007 farms in preparation of migrating them to 2010.
We built test farms, sandbox farms, and staging farms in a combination of 2007 version and 2010 version. It was a complex series of tests over several months, while we carefully coordinated with dozens of technical staff teams, and documented all things needed to be done to production 2007 farms prior to preparation for migration to 2010.
This was our most complex centralized farm that we built to date. It consisted of two web front-end servers in an extranet zone (with app server) tied to a physical load balancer and SQL cluster. Additionally, there were four internal web front end servers and eight application servers. It is noteworthy that we built eight of these servers over the course of one day using scripted techniques.
The Result
Despite complex challenges, advance security requirements, and coordination among dozens of departments, the result was a successful migration from the centralized 2007 farms to one large highly-available highly-redundant 2010 farm. Through the execution of this project, we also eliminated many redundant databases and balanced the SharePoint services carefully amongst this large farm. The system is running very well for communication, collaboration, and document management.
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