ShareGate Migrate supports concurrent migrations, offering several advantages and some drawbacks that can be mitigated if you follow our recommended best practices.
Consider concurrent migrations if you have a large or complex environment to migrate on a deadline.
Tip: Migrate Pro and Migrate Enterprise plans offer multiple machine activations to support concurrent migrations.
Advantages of concurrent migrations
When you plan concurrent migrations, you must split the migration into smaller tasks. This makes it easier to troubleshoot more complex tasks without losing progress.
With an effective concurrent migrations plan, your overall migration project should go considerably faster, saving costs and lowering the time it takes to gain value from your new environment.
This approach can also prevent revenue losses caused by outages and other problems that could arise during an extended migration.
Concurrent migrations challenges
Migrations are resource-intensive for any environment, and you must consider a few potential performance issues when planning your concurrent migrations.
ShareGate Migrate must send many API requests to rebuild your environment at the destination. The app does so by already sending many simultaneous requests to the servers within a single migration instance.
When running concurrent migrations, consider the following:
Microsoft 365 throttling
To remedy general server performance issues, Microsoft 365 has a throttling mechanism that could slow down your migration job considerably.
On-premises hardware limitations
On-premises servers (SharePoint, file share, etc.) can also suffer from performance issues if you send too many simultaneous requests that the hardware can’t process.
Increased migration complexity
Managing multiple migrations simultaneously adds complexity to your project, requiring careful coordination to avoid conflicts and ensure data integrity.
Best practices for concurrent migrations
To lower performance issues and throttling with concurrent migrations, please follow these best practices:
Mitigate hardware limitations and throttling
Run your migration instances on different machines.
Use distinct user credentials for each machine to avoid throttling getting triggered by heavy use from a single user.
Schedule migrations during off-peak hours to reduce competition for network resources with your users.
Enable ShareGate’s Insane Mode to leverage Microsoft’s Migration API, which resists throttling considerably.
For more information, see Microsoft 365 throttling.
Plan and test your migration
Conduct a proof of concept to identify potential issues and optimize migration tasks.
Start with one migration on a single machine and incrementally add more migrations to understand how many simultaneous migrations start to affect your performance negatively.
Use clear assignments
Assign each machine a distinct workload (different site collections, teams, mailboxes, etc.) to avoid overlapping tasks and data duplication.
Monitor and adjust
Use ShareGate Migrate’s migration reports to track your progress and identify bottlenecks.
Adjust performance settings as needed; start with Normal and increase or decrease cautiously.
Communication
Ensure regular reporting and updates across your migration teams to maintain coordination.
Continuous improvement
Refine your migration configurations based on results and feedback for subsequent tasks.
Concurrent migrations with PowerShell
When using a PowerShell script for migrations, you leverage automation to copy your content sequentially, improving your migration's performance in most cases.
While you cannot run parallel migrations with a single script, you can run a script on multiple workstations with different user accounts, as this article recommends.
For example, if you want to run a OneDrive for Business migration, you can create a script with a foreach loop and split the CSV file used to cycle through your OneDrives as needed to run it on multiple machines.
To learn how to create your base PowerShell script for your OneDrive for Business migrations, see our OneDrive migrations with PowerShell section.