November 2, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Hi all ... We're in the planning stages of migrating from one data center to a new one, with all new servers and a SAN instead of internal drives for SQL files.
I'd appreciate any links to checklists or documents covering migration, especially for system databases, and any specifc suggesions you may have. We have 5 SQL boxes, 3 SQL 2000 and 2 SQL 2005.
Thanks
November 4, 2008 at 7:56 pm
I have attached an outline that I put together for when I was performing database migrations from server to server.
The main hurdle to get over is coordination among all of the different teams (application support/developers, OS team, SAN storage team, etc) and making sure everyone is on the same page as you.
If you'll be keeping the same hardware, I would make sure that anything connecting via TCP/IP is confirmed.
In section 3, I mention checking for the connections currently coming in- to do so I would run profiler to find out the distinct hosts and application names are coming from to your databases.
My document is designed for DB level migrations, but I have used it when moving all databases to a new server.
Best of luck to you!
Steve (SK)
November 4, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Also, here is another document that I use when laying out the disks. The 80% usable column represents the max space that the DB files should use. We have our alerts set to start sending out automated pages at the 85% mark.
Unfortunately, I don't have any SAN configuration references to provide, but RAID 10 would be good for your tempdb data and log drives, and I believe our SAN admins utilize RAID 5 for all other drives.
The one thing you'll want to ensure is that your SAN admin physically separates the disks and doesn't provide you with one large logical drive that you partition in Windows.
Meaning, your 25GB drives should all show up as separate disks within the Disk Management console of Computer Management, and they should each one should be on separate spindles in the backend of the SAN.
Take care,
SK
November 6, 2008 at 7:25 am
Thanks !
"...
If you'll be keeping the same hardware, I would make sure that anything connecting via TCP/IP is confirmed...."
We're going to all new hardware, including a SAN to replace the internal drives setup we're on now.
I just need to make sure MASTER and MSDB get migrated correctly. Once I install SQL on the new machines, is it a simple restore of MASTER & MSDB over the empty ones from the initial install ?
I'm pretty familiar with moving user DBs around.
I'm familiar with the SAN setup because we had one set up nicely at my previous job.
We also have the issue of new server names, and are planning to change the IP address of the DNS record to the new servers IP addresses
November 6, 2008 at 11:57 am
I could be wrong, but I don't think that restoring MSDB and MASTER on a new installation is recommended if it's going to be a different server name.
I would script out the logins, linked servers, jobs, alerts, notifications, etc and re-create them on the new system as opposed to trying to restore those DBs.
To restore MSDB, you'll need to have the version and same build as the existing system, but I personally have not done that in the past. What I have done is scripted out the objects and moved them over.
If someone has a better solution, I would be curious to see their recommendation.
SK
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