I'm looking for insights from anyone who's gone through a migration like this. My organization has been using Azure File Sync to sync our on-premises file shares to Azure File Shares, and we have tiering enabled whenever our on-prem server's free space drops below 20%. This has meant that I need to run some commands to hydrate specific folders before I can use the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) to ensure that all the files in those folders get migrated to the right SharePoint sites.
I'm curious whether I can point the SharePoint migration tool directly to the Azure File Share instead of the on-prem share. If I do this, could I skip the hydration command step? Based on my tests, it seems like running the migration agent from a VM in the same Azure environment as the Azure File Share instance speeds things up quite a bit compared to running it on a local machine connected to the on-prem server.
1 Answer
I've faced a similar situation! If you use the Azure File Share instead of the on-prem share as the source for SPMT, it should work just fine. In fact, it often runs faster because, as you mentioned, the tiered files on-prem are just placeholders. When you try to access these, it pulls from Azure storage, which adds delays. We actually synced all our on-prem shares with Azure File Sync before migrating to a new file system, and it really streamlined the process.
That makes sense! Just be careful with how Azure File Sync attaches metadata. We had a hiccup when users started saving directly to Azure, and those files weren't visible through Azure File Sync anymore. Just something to keep in mind!