sql server replication: Any thoughts on how to replace a distribution server without starting all
publications from scratch?

The basic situation is that we have a lot of large publications (some
require 10 hour snapshots) using a distribution server which has some
hardware problems & my VP wants to replace the entire machine. Recreating
all those snapshots would put us out of business for a few days (as would a
major failure of that distributor).

My thoughts so far are to Ghost the OS, stop all the log agents & wait for
all the pending transactions to be distributed, then copy (or
backup/restore) msdb & distribution databases to the new server which would
already be running the Ghosted system, and have SQL running & configured for
replication. Rename the server to match the old one, remove the old one from
the domain, re-IP the new one & add it to the domain.

One more potential complication - we'd like to replace the current Ent.
version of SQL2k with the Standard edition on the new one.

Is this at all feasible? Am I missing anything, or is there a better way?
Anybody ever done it? Any other thoughts are welcome.

Thanks.

Hi,

Your basic plan looks good, but I have a couple suggestions. You should
restore the databases AFTER you've renamed the new machine to match the old
name. It probably won't make a difference but replication is sometimes
picky about being restored on a machine with a different name.

Replacing Enterprise Edition with Standard Edition won't have any impact on
the distributor. Be sure to have the same SQL service pack level on both
machines.

Since you'll be reinstalling SQL on the new machine, you could install
everything to the same drive and folder location. Then you could simply
copy the databases files (MDF and LDF) to the same location on the new
machine. That includes both system and user database.


Regards,
Shirley
SQL Server Support

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