Migrating from Physical SQL (SQL2000) To VMWare machine (SQL2008) - Transferring Large DB

Question

We're in the middle of migrating from a windows & SQL 2000 box to a Virtualised Win & SQL 2k8 box The VMWare box is on a different site, with better hardware, connectivity etc...

The old(current) physical machine is still in constant use - I've taken a backup of the DB on this machine, which is 21GB Transfering this to our virtual machine took around 7+ hours - which isn't ideal when we do the "actual" switchover.

My question is -

How should I handle the migration better? Could i set up our current machine to do log shipping to the VM machine to keep up to date? then, schedule down time out of hours to do the switch over? Is there a better way?

Answer 1

You take a full backup of the database on sql2k, then restore it with norecovery on sql2k8, then continuously take log backups from sql2k and apply them to sql2k8 (again, with norecovery). So basically you do log shipping from sql2k to sql2k8. When you swithc operation, you onyl take tail of the log backup from sql2k and apply it on sql2k8, this time with recovery, which will bring the database online and run the upgrade from the sql2k format to the sql2k8 format.

SQL 2000 backup restored on SQL 2008 is supported, but you better have SQL 2000 SP4 deployed.