Planning to move to new hardware for your SQL Server? Techniques like log shipping and database mirroring can be incredibly useful to make the change fast and painless– but you’ve got to pick the right techniques for your environment ahead of time, and know how to do a few things that aren’t in the GUI.

Here are some of my favorite whitepapers and resources to get you going.

Using Database Mirroring for Rolling Upgrades

This classic Books Online post explains the basic concept of rolling upgrades.

Database Mirroring and LogShipping Working Together

This Microsoft whitepaper by Sanjay Mishra explains how to set up a database mirroring pair with a log shipping secondary on a third server. Database Mirroring is great for fast failover during migrations. Download it here (.docx file).

Log Shipping Techniques: Reversing, Converting to Mirroring, Converting to Replication

This article by Robert Davis familiarizes you with some techniques. Read the article here.

Initializing Replication from Backup

Migrating instances participating in transactional replication can be particularly tricky. You don’t always have to re-initialize replication, but sometimes you want to do it, but you don’t want it to take forever or lock tables on the publisher. This Idera whitepaper by Robert Davis can save you a ton of time setting up a replication subscriber. Read more about it here.

Migrating SQL Server Data to Drives on a New SAN

Got a new SAN to use with an existing SQL Server? Bob Pusateri wrote a great post about how to do this with minimal downtime.

SQL Server Migration Checklist

I wrote up a checklist and did a webcast on migrations! Get ’em for free over on BrentOzar.com.