We might come across a scenario where we need to migrate the SFB servers to new pool.
There are few cases where we need to upgrade the hardware from old servers to New High performance servers on which they are running or there might be case where they need to be virtualized from hardware to VM.
This article focuses only on migrating the persistent chat pool from old server to the new server.

Below are the readiness to be completed before starting the Persistent Chat Migration:

1) The new Persistent Chat Pool should be already published in the Topology.
2) The new Persistent Chat nodes should be already added in the new pool and SFB setup Wizard should be completed.
3) Certificates should be already assigned to the new Persistent Chat Pool.
4) Connectivity from the OLD PC pool to the new SQL DB is already established.
5) Connectivity from the new PC pool to the old SQL DB is already Established.
6) Establish a connectivity from the old PC hosts to the new PC hosts

To Start the Migration:

Check your current persistent category,Addin,Policy and configuration.
This can be verified by checking through control panel persistent chat tab or through Shell.

To Check Persistent Chat Category:

Get-CsPersistentChatCategory -PersistentChatPoolFqdn “Pchat.exchangequery.com”
Make a note of the current number persistent chat rooms

To Check the rooms:

Get-CsPersistentChatRoom | select Name

To Check the Disabled rooms:

Get-CsPersistentChatRoom -Disabled:$True

After confirming that these disabled rooms will not be in use we can remove them before we migrate since there is no use of moving these obsolete ones to the new pool.

Get-Cspersistentchatroom -Disabled:$True | Remove-CsPersistentChatRoom

Export the Old Pool Persistent Chat Configuration by Running the below command:

Export-CsPersistentChatData -DBInstance “SQLCL01.Exchangequery.com\SFBDB” -FileName “c:\temp\PChatBckup.zip”

The exported Configuration data will look in XML as below

Import Persistent Chat data that we exported to new Skype for Business Pool:

Import-CsPersistentChatData -DBInstance “SQLCL02.Exchangequery.com\SkypeDB” -FileName “c:\temp\PChatBckup.zip”

We will get a confirmation as below before the import and  the progress bar

Once the above command is done we can see the old PC config data imported in the MGC DB in the SQL.

After the above command is run we can see the chat rooms are duplicated since it created the new instance in the new pool.

Later we can delete them by running the below command:

Get-CsPersistentChatRoom -PersistentChatPoolFqdn “Pchat.exchangequery.com” |Remove-CsPersistentChatRoom

Then remove the persistent chat category:

Get-CsPersistentChatCategory -PersistentChatPoolFqdn “Pchat.exchangequery.com”| remove-cspersistentchatcategory
After this is done go ahead and try logging into the Persistent Chat Enabled User and see the results.

In my case what happened was the connections were still going to the old Persistent Chat Pool

Guess it was because the Old Persistent Chat Pool was First in the Persistent Chat Pools in the list on Topology Builder.
So Went ahead and removed the old persistent chat pool from the Topology , Publised the Topology , rerun the setup on new PCHAT nodes.

After this the new connections were going to the new Persistent Chat pool.
All my Persistent Chat rooms that i was member of was present AS IS and only thing is that the rooms that i was following disappeared from my list.
That was a small thing only and i was able to search those rooms and follow them again.

Thanks & Regards
Sathish Veerapandian
MVP – Office Servers & Services