MS CRM 4 – Migrate Database Servers and Versions

I had a good working weekend last Saturday.   I moved our CRM 4 databases (2 organization databases and the config database) to a new server.  It was as smooth a migration as I could have ever hope for.

Here is the server I moved from:

• Windows 2003 Server 64 bit
• SQL 2005 64 bit

Here is what I moved to:

• Windows 2008 R2 64 bit
• SQL 2008 R2 64 bit

I had done my research and found Microsoft’s CRM team blog site.  It has a great article on  how to import an organization vs. edit an organization.  I used this article plus some testing to come up with my plan.  Note that I am only moving the databases.  I am not moving the reports as they are on a server just for reports.  I am also using Scribe to do some data integration so you will see those steps as well.

1. Deactivate ALL organizations in the CRM Deployment Manager.
2. Pause the Scribe integrations.
3. Stop the Scribe Services.
4. Stop the CRM Services.
5. Backup all CRM Databases.
6. Be sure all the logins are correct on the new DB server.
7. Restore the DBs on the new server.
8. Start the CRM Services.
9. Add the new DB server in the CRM Deployment Manager. (See the Edit Organization section of this article on details of how to do this)
10. Activate the organizations in the CRM Deployment Manager.
11. Test CRM to see that the site is responding.
12. Start the Scribe Services.
13. Resume the Scribe Integrations.
14. Some of the reports will need to have their data sources reconfigured if you hardcoded the data source.

All of this took me about 2 hours.  That is with 2 organizations with one of them very small and the other being very large.

Sir Slur