I had to move our CRM install this week to new hardware, and I had expected it to be a nasty job. However it turned out to be straight forward, though it is really hard to find any useful Microsoft Dynamics CRM documentation beyond the basic manuals. Why do the Dynamics team make it so hard to find things out?

Anyway these are the steps to follow:

To move the database (got this process from a Microsoft Knowledgebase document on setting up SQL clustering for CRM)

  1. Backup the CRM databases in SQL Manager (the yourcompany_METABASE and yourcompany_MSCRM)
  2. Restore them on the new SQL server
  3. On the CRM server load the CRM deployment management tool
  4. Select the Server Manager, your server and right click to get properties.
  5. Use the Configure SQL option to point at the new SQL server
  6. And that should be all!
  7. I recommend then taking the old SQL server CRM DBs off line to make sure there is no confusion.

Now that was not hard was it, using this process I moved our DBs from an old SQL 2000 server to a new SQL 2005 64Bit server.

However I could not move the front end to a new 64Bit platform as it only support Asp.Net 1.1. All the post I found said that it will not work with ASP.NET 2.0 and on 64Bit it is .NET 2.0 only. So I put the front end onto a Virtual 32bit Windows 2003 server I had for just such legacy systems.

  1. On the new server run the CRM 3.0 installer
  2. Let it install any prerequisites, services etc.
  3. Enter your existing product key
  4. Point it at your existing CRM Db
  5. On the page that says if it can install or not you will get a warning that the product key is already in the DB and will be ignored, you might get some more depending on setup
  6. Let the install run to completion
  7. You should now have a new front end server that points to the existing DB with all the data there as you would hope. Also all the license/user management will be as it was before.

Again not to hard, why is it not documented anywhere I could find?

This setup will do us until the vNext edition comes out with proper .NET 2 support.

Of course these notes have to carry the usual disclaimer of make sure you backup first!