Various Office 365 Migration methods offer varying performance results based on how and when migrations are performed. Also, many migrations and network factors and throttling mechanisms impact migration performance. Luckily, there are some best practices to enhance your overall experience of migration to the cloud environment. Here is a quick insight into some proven methods:

Migration Methods

• Instead of the allowed limit of 2000, use 150 mailboxes at a given time during cutover migration.

Migration and Network Performance Factors

• Figure out the available network capacity and maximum upload capacity. Contact your ISP and find out the allocated bandwidth and restrictions. To evaluate your actual network capacity, use tools and other network loads, such as back-end tasks, also need to be determined.
• Team up with your hardware vendor and apply the required drivers and software updates to resolve network instabilities.
• Work with your ISP for internet issues, assess network delays for all potential Microsoft datacenters, add the IP addresses of the Microsoft datacenter servers to your list (your allow list), or bypass migration-related traffic from your firewall.

Throttling

• In resource health-based throttling, if a service availability issue impacts a critical end-user operation, hybrid migrations are stalled until performance recovery. If you face such a problem, wait for the Office 365 resources to become available.

Non-hybrid Deployment Migrations

• To enhance system performance, monitor the system performance during a pilot migration test. Avoid an aggressive migration schedule for the specific system if the system is busy. Add hardware resources and move tasks and users to the servers not involved in the migration. Create a migration-user list that is evenly distributed across numerous mailbox servers in case of an on-premises Exchange organization with multiple mailbox servers. You may fine-tune the list for maximum throughput.
• Minimize resource-intensive, back-end tasks that may interfere with the migration.
• Evaluate the throttling policy for your email system. Some versions of Exchange restrict IMAP access to the on-premises mail server and RPC over HTTP Protocol access.

Note that the above three practices also hold for third-party tools.

• The migration dashboard is used for cutover, IMAP, and staged Exchange migrations and is governed by Office 365 migration-service throttling. Specify the migration concurrency. After you create a migration batch, use this Windows PowerShell cmdlet in order to increase the default value 20 to a maximum value of 100.

PowerShell

• Set-MigrationEndPoint -MaxConcurrentMigrations

Move Requests

For hybrid migration for Exchange 2003 users:

• Determine the number of mailboxes to migrate at a point in time. For this, calculate the amount of time the move request waits in the queue as give here:

(total number of mailboxes to migrate) = ((total time) – (average queue time)) * (migration throughput)

Start the migration earlier than planned to save time.

• Determine the queue time. For this purpose, schedule a test move many hours before you start the actual migration and estimate the migration start time and number of mailboxes to be moved.

Third-party Tools

• Use Exchange Web Services impersonation than using client protocols, such as RPC over
  HTTP Protocol.
• Add more migration servers and use multiple Office 365 administrative users accounts for migration tools that use RPC over HTTP Protocol.
• While using the RPC over HTTP Protocol, connect to the Office 365 mailbox with Outlook, import a.pst file with sample data to the Office 365 mailbox, and measure migration performance by calculating the time taken to upload the .pst file.

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