SQL Server – How to Migrate Always On Availability Group to New SAN

availability-groupsmigrationsansql servervmware

What are the steps required to move AAGs (version=SQL 2012 and OS=Windows 2012 R2 O) to new SAN within same data center?

It is a virtualized environment.

Instead of building new servers – can the VM and storage be v-motioned to new storage?

Best Answer

Because you are working with Virtual Environments, you can just do a storage migration. This will probably cause some performance problems so I would do the following:

  1. Set the Secondary to be async
  2. Use VMWare to migrate the storage to the new SAN
  3. Put the secondary back to synchronous commit
  4. Failover to secondary
  5. Repeat for next server

I am aware that it takes longer to migrate storage when the VM is running. It may be quicker to shutdown the Secondary, then move the storage, then start it back up again, failover and then do the other server.

There is no need to remove servers from the Availability Group. AAG's are designed to be able to shutdown a node for a period of time.

If you shutdown or change to async, you'll need to make sure there is enough storage space to keep the transaction log until the server is running at full speed again (or comes back online if you shutdown).