The ability for On Demand service principals to access and operate with assets requires explicit permissions. The Tenant Administrator grants these permissions through consents. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is supported for tenant administrators when granting consents.
Each tenant that is added has granted consent to the initial Core - Basic permission set to the On Demand service principal. Additional consents are required to work with different features of On Demand Migration for Hybrid Exchange.
Granting Consent
- Click Tenants from the navigation pane.
- Select a tenant and click Edit Consents from the tenant tile.
- Click Grant Consent or Regrant Consent for the permissions type. Then click Accept in the Microsoft consents dialog.
This section lists the minimum consents and roles required by the On Demand Migration service principals.
For initial tenant setup
| Add and configure tenants, and grant consent |
Core - Basic consent from Target tenant administrator accounts.
Global Administrator role from target tenant administrator accounts. |
For Mailbox migration
| All tasks |
Migration - Basic consent from Target tenant administrator accounts. |
| Migrate mailboxes |
Migration - Mailbox Migration consent from Target tenant administrator accounts. |
When you have granted the consents, verify that the service principals were successfully created in the target tenant as described in the steps below:
- Log in to the Azure admin portal.
- Open the Microsoft Entra ID service page.
- Click Enterprise applications from the navigation pane. Then click All applications.
- Filter the list if necessary and verify the list of service principals. Your list may differ from the image below.
Microsoft service throttling limits the number of concurrent calls to a Microsoft service to prevent overuse of resources. These limits are set by the Microsoft services and are dependent on the service type along with the operations that are being completed by On Demand for the service. In addition, any throttling limits are subject to change by Microsoft.
Microsoft Graph
Microsoft Graph is designed to handle a high volume of requests. If an overwhelming number of requests occurs, throttling helps maintain optimal performance and reliability of the Microsoft Graph service. For more information, see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/throttling. Microsoft enforce throttling limits for Microsoft Graph based on tenant size, including requests-per-minute and requests-per-day. Microsoft does not provide a method for modifying these limits.
Microsoft Power BI REST API
The Microsoft Power BI REST API (Admin API) may experience throttling during usage, as concurrent API access is monitored for any ongoing tasks within a tenant. Discovery tasks are likely to be the most affected by this throttling. We recommend that discovery or statistics collection be run as standalone tasks to minimize potential impacts.
For more information, please reference the following documentation from Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/#throttling
- Limitations for reading of workspaces
- Limitations for reading users in workspaces
Handling ODM Throttling
Quest On Demand Migration follows best practices provided by Microsoft when experiencing throttling. These include reducing the number of operations of requests, reducing the frequency of calls and avoiding immediate retries, since all requests accrue against the usage limits for the application.
For requests that an application makes, such as On Demand Migration, including Microsoft Graph, CSOM, or REST calls, Microsoft can return error codes including HTTP status code 429 ("Too many requests") or 503 ("Server Too Busy") which result in the requests to fail. In both cases, a Retry-After header is included in the response indicating how long the calling application should wait before retrying or making a new request.
Upgrading Throttling Policies
Exchange Web Services (EWS) are throttled by Microsoft whenever large quantities of data flows through the EWS platform. The On Demand Migration service throughput can be improved by upgrading the following throttling policy parameter setting to Unlimited:
- EwsMaxBurst - Defines the amount of time that an EWS user can consume an elevated amount of resources before being throttled. This is measured in milliseconds. This value is set separately for each component.
- EwsRechargeRate - Defines the rate at which an EWS user's budget is recharged (budget grows by) during the budget time.
- EwsCutoffBalance - Defines the resource consumption limits for EWS user before that user is completely blocked from performing operations on a specific component.
Tenant administrators can upgrade the throttling policies by making a service request with Microsoft.
To complete a migration project, a lightweight user desktop application called Desktop Update Agent (DUA) must be configured and deployed by administrators and run on users workstations. DUA provides enhanced support, helps ensure the success of cross-tenant migration projects, makes agent delivery easier, and status reporting more informative.
DUA features:
- Ability to manage user’s application reconfigurations activities from a single view within On Demand Migration.
- Support for Microsoft 365 application license reset.
- Support for various client authentication mechanisms.
For more information about downloading, administration and use of DUA, see the Quest On Demand Migration Update Agent Guide.
Any full scale migration should be preceded by test and pilot migrations, to confirm that your migration processes and procedures will accommodate the organization requirements.
- A test migration uses real users and real data in a segregated test environment, or dummy users and dummy data in your live production environment.
- A pilot migration uses a small portion of real users and real data in the live production environment.
In either case - a test or pilot migration - the data to be migrated should be a representative sample of the production data, and the test or pilot migration should be run with the Quest applications set for the same configuration and process options that you intend to use for the production migration. it is recommended to select test or pilot users whose usage and data types make them representative of the total user population. Then create and run matching / migration tasks for those accounts, including all range of tasks you are planning to perform. When the tasks are completed, review errors and warnings, if any. See Event Management section for more information.
Quest recommends that you use both test and pilot migrations:
Perform one or more test migrations in a separate test environment, migrating test copies of real users and their real data. The separate test environment ensures that no test process will affect the data or configurations of your production environment. If a test exposes any problems under migration, you can make amendments and then repeat the test by simply dumping the test environment and recreating it from scratch.
When you are confident that your test migrations have sufficiently refined your planned migration, perform a pilot migration for 20 or 30 users to verify if your planned migration is satisfactory for your "real world."
