Moving SharePoint 2010 to a new SQL Server

As a part of an Enterprise SharePoint 2010 portal migration to new hardware, I had developed a plan to utilize a new SQL server.

I found this article which gives direction to move all databases.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc512723(v=office.14).aspx

This one uses a database detach and restore along with a SQL alias to trick SharePoint into thinking it is still pointing to the old server.

The database detach and restore method will not work for us as we have over 1TB of data and around 50 databases to move in a small ASI (outage) window.

I planned to adapt this by backing up from the old, restoring to new, with the SQL alias to redirect. This is touched on in the technet article, but there's no detailed instruction there.

Here was my plan
  1. Back up all the sharepoint databases including the sharepoint_config db;
  2. Restore them to the new server
  3. Add a WFE (web front end) to the current farm (not in the load balancer)
  4. Add a SQL Alias to the new SQL server.
  5. Add a SQL Alias to the new WFE server.
  6. Add a local HOSTS file entry to point to the new WFE server with the portal URL.
  7. Make sure the site still works.
  8. Verify edits that I make are on the new WFE, not Production
Assuming that worked, I could run regular incremental backups of the old farm and restores to the new farm.  During my outage window, i would then stop the old farm, do a last incremental backup and restore, and add the aliases to the WFEs that are in the load balancer.

Simple, right?

The first time through step 7 failed with the error "Cannot connect to the configuration database" 
upon further review, I discovered that my new SQL had named pipes turned off.  Enabling remote connections using named pipes and tcp/ip fixed that issue.

Comments

  1. Mark LattureApril 22, 2014 at 4:47 PM

    Got it Figured out! Thanks to this article: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/walzenbach/archive/2010/04/14/how-to-enable-remote-connections-in-sql-server-2008.aspx

    I needed to enable remote connections on the server through named pipes since that's how aliases communicate. The event viewer on my web server pointed me in that direction.

    ReplyDelete

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