Windows 2008 Failover Cluster Migration

[Willybobs27]

I have a Windows 2008 Failover cluster running SQL. This is required to to be migrated to a different NetApp.

In the past I have done this operation with Windows 2003 Clusters and had to be careful with disk signatures and use a Microsoft tool to re-add resources etc.

Has anyone done this with a Windows 2008 failover cluster? If so do you have the method? Are there any papers on this?

I know I can simply add new disk using Snap Drive then migrate using Snap Manager for SQL but I wondered if there were a method using Snap Mirror that might be more time effective with less downtime.

[wduvall02]

I just performed this migration this week for our SQL database.  I used QSM (Because I was migrating from 32-bit to 64-bit).

- Create new igroups on new filer and verify settings before the outage.

- Snapmirror volumes.  Make sure to allow this to complete ahead of time to reduce the length of the outage

- Shutdown the Cluster

- Unmap the LUNs

- Update Snapmirror relationship

- Quiesce and Break the relationship

- Map LUNs to igroups on new filer (I used the same LUN IDs to be safe)

- Rescanned for disks on the hosts

- Brought the disks online for the host that last held the reservations.  The disks will show "Reserved"

- Brought the disks online for the other node's in the cluster.

- Startup the cluster and verify the disks show up as they should.

I then failed over all of the cluster resources to the other node to verify they came up properly.  I had to do this from the command line (Run as administrator) and use "disk group /status" to find the resources then use "disk group <GROUP> /move:<NODE>

This took about half an hour from shutdown to verify as I had most of the commands on the filer scripted out ahead of time.