February 6, 2017 at 1:00 pm
Good morning all....
I have not had to do a lot of replication work - once its setup it just runs for the most part. We need to move one of our servers from Physical to Virtual.
The current server (Call it OldServer1) is involved in transactional replication as a pulisher/distributor and subscriber over a few different tables, some are large, and the idea would be to minimize downtime - If I have to reinitialize everything it will take hours (at least) for the replication to catch up. I already have the new Virtual Server (NewServer1) available to me. We have quite a few connections from a LOT of different applications connecting to the old server, so we were going to put a DNS Alias on the new machine and take the old machine completely offline - so as long as no one hardcoded IP addresses in the connection the applications should not really notice much of a difference... My question is why do I need to wait till the downtime to setup the replication? Should I not be able to just Setup all the replication to where the "new" server is the subscriber? as long as the physical name does not change Replication does not care what the DNS Alias is, correct?
my plan would be go ahead and add this new Server as a subscriber to my existing replication - when the downtime occurs I would just go to the publisher and remove the subsciption to OldServer1 and keep the new one and there would be no real downtime? I would still need to recreate the subsciptiong going FROM the NewServer -> other server, but at least half would be done already.....
I hope that is clear, please let me know if I need to clarify it more...
February 10, 2017 at 7:00 am
Hello there,
actually I did not really understand your szenario, and which server ist publisher, wich is subscriber....
In general:
If you new server is a publisher and/or distributor, you can configure it at any time. Just create the publication, add the articles etc.
As for the subscriber: if the subscriber has all the data of the publisher, there is no need of a full initialization. Just create a new subscription from the publisher to the new subscriber, and use the option "do not initialize".
This way you tell the publisher, that all the data is already transferred, and it starts transferring data with the next occuring transaction.
Have a look at the stored procedure sp_addsubscription and it's parameter @sync_type.
For a more detailled answer please give some short information, which server takes what role whithin the replication.
Another important thing to know would be, on which server is whicht data when transferring? Does each server has all the current data of the database? Or do you need to copy?
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