Advice? Server migrations with replication.

  • I have been tasked with migrating our sql servers

    to new hardware, about 6 of them are standard 2005

    servers that have publications that are subscribed

    to from the main 'reporting' server. All of these are

    moving to new hardware (all to internal disks as we

    do not have san storage). I plan to sequence it as

    follows: 1 - Get the main 'reporting' machine up and

    running first, and start subscribing to the existing

    publications from live servers

    2 - Restore the most recent backup of the live servers

    to the new hardware then get the developers to change

    the connection strings on the webservers to start

    writing data to the new servers.

    The question I have of all the seasoned pro's out there

    is, do you think this is the best sequence? And what

    'catches' or 'gotchas!' should I watch out for?

    Many thanks all

    voltron

  • The last move I did was SSRS 2005.

    I restored the dbs to new hardware with a different name and ip address as the original server following the instructions below:

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/842425/en-us

    I then tested the reports etc from my machine by updating the hosts file to point to the new server once i'd confirmed it was ok i arranged some downtime to switch the old server off, change the ip address and name to the same as the old server so I didnt have to change any client settings. It was a bit fiddly to get things right after that, I would recommend deleting all replication before doing this as it can get messy otherwise, you have to update SQL with the new name and you will also have to live with the fact the the local user groups are named after the old machine name.

    It took about an hour to get it all sorted but it was worth it considering all the client connections I would have had to update. Obviously if you only have to update it in a couple of locations I would go with pointing the clients to the new server name. Both should be relatively simple to roll back if it all goes wrong.

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