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