Hello,

We are currently in the process of data migration from EMC Sandisk to 3 Par. We are using SQL Server 2000 machines. The

version is:

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 - 8.00.2040 (Intel X86) May 13 2005 18:33:17 Copyright (c) 1988-2003 Microsoft Corporation Enterprise Edition on Windows NT 5.2 (Build 3790: Service Pack 1)

We have the following "Central Publisher with remote Distributor" transactional replication topology set up:

Publisher
Distributor
5 Subscribers (Push Subscription)

All above are dedicated MSSQL Servers.

We plan to perform data migration of the Publisher (PRIMARY) Server from EMC Sandisk to 3 PAR.

We also have clustering set up as such:

PRIMARY (CLUSTER 01) - Active/Passive (2 machines)
SECONDARY + DISTRIBUTOR (CLUSTER 02) - Active/Active (2 machines)
SUB1 + SUB2 + SUB3 (CLUSTER 03) - Active/Active/Active (3 machines)
SUB4 + SUB5 (CLUSTER 04) - Active/Active (2 machines)

The current plan is as follows:

1. Make sure all applications reading/writing from/to the databases on the PRIMARY server are disabled
2. Disable all the jobs on the PRIMARY server and wait for them to finish
3. Through Replication Monitor on the DISTRIBUTOR Stop Log Read, Stop Synchronization of 5 subscribers
4. Disable all the jobs on the DISTRIBUTOR server and wait for the jobs to finish

At this point PRIMARY and SUBSCRIBERS 1-5 should have identical data, with no new data and no new requests coming in.
The green light will be given to the IT team to copy over the data/log files to the drives on 3 PAR with identical drive names.

The IT team will take the PRIMARY cluster down (thereby stopping SQL Service and agent), copy over the files to the pre-created drives with allocated space. Once copying of data files is done, the cluster will be brought back up, and SQL
Service and Agent started for the PRIMARY Server.

Once databases are accessible, I will do the following:

1. Start Log Reader Agent
2. Start synchronizing SUBSCRIBERS 1-5
3. Enable jobs on DISTRIBUTOR
4. If replication is working, jobs on PRIMARY will be enabled, and new data will be allowed to come in.


My questions are as follows:

1. Is there someting I am missing in the plan? Should I be doing something else?
2. Am I doing any extra/unnecessary steps?
3. Will the DISTRIBUTOR complain if the PUBLISHER goes down? If so, should I just take it offline during this process?
4. Is there any chance that Replication can break during/after this process?



Thanks a lot for the help!

Check the following article...
Moving Replicated Databases - SQLServerCentral

Mohammed,

Thank you for the link.

In our case, however, SQL Service was stopped. This allowed us to easily copy over the database files from one drive to another (with the same name). Once copying was over,SQL Service was started, and everything was working fine.

We did this move yesterday with no problems

Thanks a lot!