Moving SharePoint Databases

For a while now we have wanted to move all of our internal SharePoint databases off on one virtual server and onto another one to free up some space for new virtual machines. Not thinking that this would be all that hard, we began moving over the content databases. No problem. Then it came time to move the Central Admin content database. The problem was you set the configuration for the Central Admin content DB in central admin. So if you remove the content database, you will no longer have a central admin to do anything from. The trick around this is to use the stsadm -addcontentdb command to attach central admin to a new content DB. The entire directions can be found on this blog.

After we got the Central Admin content DB moved over we tried to move the Configuration databases next. This was a little more trouble than we thought. We searched around the net and everyone said that you can't move the Configuration database to another server. We knew there had to be a way. So we moved the database to the new server and pointed SharePoint to the new DB. We noticed that we started getting a ton of Error 3760 in the event log saying that the login falied because the config database could not be found. So we began poking into the database itself and found many areas that were still looking for the old config database. So we did more poking and found the GUID for the new DB and replaced the old DB GUIDs with the new ones. We knew that doing this could completely destroy SharePoint, so we backed up the databases. Well our errors disappeared, once we changed all of the references to the old DB to the new one. We started getting a couple of other errors that we are working on yet, but to those who say the configuration database could not be moved, it can, it is just a lot of work. Maybe in a future version of SharePoint it will be easier to move the config DB over.

For more information on moving SharePoint databases check out this blog.