Apr 13 2022 06:14 AM
I have seen several articles about tenant-to-tenant migrations including M365 commercial migrations to M365 GCC High but have not seen any that provide guidance about migrating from M365 GCC High back to M365 commercial. I know this is an unusual scenario but I have a customer who wants to do it. Of course, having a lab environment would work best for testing but it would be hard to get in configured in short order. Can someone from Microsoft chime in and a) explain possible strategies b) any past experience, c) would it require 3rd-party tools d) is there anything Microsoft can do on the backend to facilitate the migration, and e) how to handle licensing.
Thanks,
Gary Howard
Jul 20 2023 11:35 PM
Jul 21 2023 07:15 AM
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.
Jul 21 2023 07:21 AM
@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
Jul 21 2023 07:34 AM
Jul 21 2023 09:22 AM
Oct 20 2023 11:28 AM
Oct 20 2023 11:29 AM
Oct 20 2023 12:04 PM
@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.