DFSR to Azure File Sync | DFS cross domain Migration | Azure File Sync Agent issue and Solution

Migration is always a part of our life and part of this fantastic IT world . Recently management took decision to migrate old DFS environment to new corpnet domain . Our DFS environment is not massive but not less than 10 TB . We have forest trust in place and both the environment has a segment or part in Azure . So in a simple word the entire migration will happen from Azure VM to Azure VM . Instead of following traditional DFS migration strategy we take a decision to use the power of Azure or cloud to get the entire work done . So we made a very simple strategy .

We will use AzureFileSync to sync the entire data from OLD DFS VM to AzureFileShare(SMB) . And once we have the entire data in place we will sync back the entire data to our new DFS VM with the help of AzureFileSync . basically we will sue AzureFileShare as a staging environment of data and AzureFileSync as a sync medium . As a benefit of this process we will get a copy of entire DFS data in AzureFileShare . If we need we can share the access of that data directly from file share , we can control the access of the data through RBAC .

To make sure everything will work as expected I have created two domain with forest trust and perform the entire migration . That worked perfectly . Although to build entire environment it took almost 5 hours but the testing was worth for me . Once we have the first level success we planed to test the environment in real production environment . We create another DFS VM with exact same data and tried to perform the entire work . As this is a part of production we took note each and every step and we kept a very close look of the success and error . As a prt of process we installed storagesync agent in that VM and tried to add drives as a data source . But that got failed . We thought there might be some problem with the installation of the agent . So let’s un-install and re-insatll the agent . So from appwiz.cpl I have un-installed the agent . That was the bad step that I have performed . During next installation we got stucked in wizard . It tried to start the StorageSync Service but it couldnot . As we have unified support plan I have raised a ticket to Microsoft to solve this issue . After spending few days Microsoft engineer couldn’t resolve the issue . During a conversion with my supervisor we came to a piont that the agent must left files/someting in behind that is basically creating problem . Yesterday during troubleshooting I have removed old filesync  data from  registry and restarted the VM . Then I have tried to install the agent and it’s boommmmmm . Installation is completed successfully . So if you face the same issue remove all old data , restart the VM and try the installation again .