Using replication to perform migrations to new platform.

[CRKeo]

Hi,

We are about to implement some new hardware within our data centre, we already use Veeam for backup within our existing VMWare environment.

We have a new Cisco UCS/NetApp solution going in, still based on VMWare/Windows.

One of our main applications is based on Sharepoint, we have 2x SP servers 2x Web Front ends 2x Web IIS Application Servers and a 3 node active/active/passive SQL cluster using RDM storage.

We will be migrating all of our virtual machines from the old platform also based on VMWare, it has been suggested that we can simply use Veeam replication to migrate all the servers over to the new solution. Can anyone tell me if there's any gotchas in this approach? I'm thinking mainly around the Sharepoint/SQL cluster area (cluster is using RDM storage) I'm guessing for most reasonably static servers it will be perfectly fine. I'm also wondering if there is any consideration for synchronization or time sensitive aspects within the Sharepoint envrionment?

Everything will still be on the same network/VLAN config etc. there will be a direct network connection between both the new and the old solutions they will be sat next to each other in the data center.

Any thoughts or advise would be appreciated.

Thanks

[csinetops]

I went through the same thing when we moved data centers last year, also to NetApp storage and Cisco UCS . In my experience SharePoint is pretty sensitive to database blips etc. We did the initial replication and then just kept it replicating every night for about a week. Then I took a small maintenance window, shut the SharePoint environment down, did one last replication and failed over to the replica's.

Everything came back up just fine. Total down time was less than 15 minutes.

I actually moved my whole data center this way over a 30 day period. Most stuff I just let Veeam shut down and fail over using the planned fail over feature, then did a permanent fail over . Technically you could do this with your SharePoint environment as you have 2 of everything. I'm a little more comfortable with a small planned outage with something high profile. If something doesn't go as planned, you aren't scrambling to fix it with pissed off end users.

[foggy]

I'm also along the lines above. Here you can find some additional considerations regarding SharePoint farm backup.