Moving WSS Web Applications between Farms

Many months ago we upgraded a web server used to host WSS sites.  Before the server was upgraded from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008, all the original server functions and WSS sites were moved to a virtual machine.  Recently it became necessary to move the WSS sites off the virtual machine and back to the original server where MOSS 2007 had been installed and running as a separate farm.

These are the steps we used to move the WSS web applications between two different SharePoint server farms:

1. Collect all necessary configuration information for each web application on source farm
   1. Name of the content database
   2. Copy of the web.config
   3. Managed Path configuration
   4. Any other configuration points that may needed to be rebuild the web application…
2. Delete the web application on the source farm
   1. No - content database delete
   2. Yes – IIS web site delete
3. Create a new web application on the target farm
   1. In our case http:// for the default zone
   2. Name the content database something you will recognize ie. WSS_CONTENT_Delete
4. Give the farm account on the target farm permissions to the original content database in SQL Server
   1. public and dbo
5. If there is a GUID in the content database name, it can be renamed in SQL Server at this point
6. Remove the new content database associated with the new web application creation on the target server.  This is in the Central Administration | Application Management | SharePoint Web Application Management | Content Databases.  Make a note of the content database name if the the default name was used.
7. Change the Alternate Access Mappings (AAM) in Operations | Global Configuration | Alternate Access Mappings
8. Add the original content database to the new web application via STSADM.  We used STSADM instead of the GUI because the GUI instructed us to due to possible timeouts.
   1. stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://THE_URL –databasename THE_DATABASE_NAME –databaseserver THE_DATABASE_SERVER_NAME
9. Apply any additional configuration
10. Change any firewall rules
11. Check access to the new web application
12. Delete the new content database from step 3 and 6 from SQL Server
    

Note: In this particular case, both farms shared the same database server so we had no need to move the physical databases.

posted @ Wednesday, May 12, 2010 7:52 AM