Task to migrate to 2014, servers have replication. Subscriptions are transnational, pull.
domain1.com: server1 is publisher, server2 is distributor and subscriber.
These are 2008R2 (yeah, gotta move it...)
Databases are large, so making snapshot and re-establishing subscription would be a trouble and quite likely not fast enough to fit into downtime window anyways.
We do not have much control over how the customer will move databases, so far they are not doing ms sql backup and restore. They are doing files snapshot on SAN and moving the data this way and attaching the databases to sql 2014 instances. Server names
change, domain changes.
New servers are in new domain. Let's name it domainnew.com
Servernew1.Domainnew.com will take databases from server1.domain1.com, and Servernew2.domainnew.com will take databases from server2.domain1.com
publisher and subscriber roles remain the same : servernew1 publisher, servernew2 distributor and subscriber. these are 2014.
To make it fun, domain1 and domainnew are trusting one another. Production servers server1 and server2 will be up after the move and they want to run it in parallel with the new system as a test/QA.
Security wise windows users from new domain already registered in production databases a while ago and working.
We will be able to shut down production systems, flow the data all the way through to replicated database and downstream (warehouses etc) before SAN snapshots will be taken and database files being copied.
What is needed is to reestablish pull subscriptions in new domain without doing snapshot and initializing subscriptions is a big question. Having the fact that old servers are not down, they will be up, and news servers can see those and wise versa (do not
have control over that particular part... we may request temporary cut the link for maintenance window, that's about it).
We will not have ms sql backups during the move. Publisher database and subscriber are not clones, replicated data set is only the particular subset of tables, 1.5TB roughly.
What can we do if we have databases copied 'cold' on SAN level and attached to the new servers.
Redoing replication (kill old one. script publication, do snapshot and whole 9 yards is... very very slow, we will not likely if into maintenance window) is not fast enough.
We do not have full backup to restore in that process (their backup subsystem is very slow), the do it faster basically doing a form of file copy of mdf and ldf's.
Is there a way to create new replication in this case and synchronize without snapshot?
thanks