Forum Discussion
M365 GCC High to M365 Commercial migration
We recently went through this with a small city client. We went back and forth with Microsoft support for months. (They are SO slow to respond). There is no supported migration to convert an existing tenant.
From what I was able to glean from Microsoft's replies, it sounds like the GCC low & GCC high tenants reside on different servers than commercial tenants. So, they can't just be changed to a different status.
In the end we created a new 365 commercial tenant and used a 3rd party migration tool (BitTitan) to move/copy the users Mailboxes & OneDrives over to the new tenant.
SabersKiss many thanks for the reply, was very helpful. My customer's intent is to create a new M365 Commercial tenant too then copy the data. Did you encounter any challenges/ unsupported scenarios performing the copy from the GCC tenant? Apart from Mail, OneDrive we have Teams workload too.
Regards,
Ravi
- Not really, but the client wasn't utilizing much of the 365 features, so it's probably not a fair comparison. They were in GCC Low, and they only used email, OneDrive, and Teams chat. Literally it was only four users to move.
The hardest parts for us was licensing both tenants for the transition. (We use Pax8 for licensing.) We had to open a second support ticket with Microsoft to buy GCC licenses direct in the old tenant to keep things going while we changed the linked tenant in Pax8 to buy the licenses for the Commercial tenant.
We had a little trouble with BitTitan's migration, but that was just normal authentication issues.
I'm not aware of a way to migrate things like PowerBI, or Planner Plans, Forms, etc. Those could be a nightmare.- We're up for gcch renewal in two weeks. Were you able to extend by a month or two?
chuck99z28 Yes. Once we had the licenses purchased by MS direct in the GGC Low tenant we could let it sit there as long as we wanted. Once we were done, we just cancelled the licenses in the GCC tenant, and we were done. Another tech took care of this part, so I can't speak to exactly what happened, but I think we had to get the annual commitment but were refunded for the remainder when we cancelled. Something about monthly commitment wasn't available. I don't understand what the deal was because at the time Pax8 didn't have an annual commitment option for GCC licenses. So, apparently MS direct purchasing was a little different. Despite it only being a few users, it took us several months to get it done. (For reasons completely unrelated to technical reasons). So, I know you can have the licenses in there for a while if needed.
- Thanks as well. I found this useful.
- Thank you, will share my experiences after...
