Move SharePoint 2010 Farm to New Server

Question

My company uses SharePoint 2010 portal and it is used by more than 3500+ users worldwide. We are planning to move the Farm to another physical location due to end of lease at current location. The Farm is running on Virtualized environment(VMWARE).

We have the following constraints:

1. Content Database size is 200+ GB(all in one site collection) and copying files will take many days. so backup and restore or platform backup is ruled out in my situation.
2. It's very time critical and we want to have a minimum downtime and we only have 2 days to complete the process so that Businesses across the regions are not affected by this change.

I'm considering the following approach.

1. Split content databases in to 8 site collection and reduce the Core Database size to around 30GB.
2. Clone WFE and App server and move to new location.
3. Install SQL Server at new location
4. Perform Move all database approach as mentioned in this article and join the cloned WFE and App Server. This will create a fully functional SharePoint Farm. This step is for test purpose only to check if this approach will work or not.
5. Configure DNS entries.

Will the above mentioned approach work?

I'm sure many would have come across similar situation.

What would be the best practices or Microsoft recommended approach/solution?

Answer 1

I would definitely lock the Site Collections to read-only so I could start the database copying while the site was still online (without the possibility to write).

Won't "Clone WFE and App server and move to new location" be problematic for testing - how do you do that even? I would setup another SharePoint Farm manually and test the move of all databases to that farm first - but just access it with another DNS-test namn. Then when you know that it works you can perform the real move and redirect the DNS when you can see that it is up and running and working.

0 downtime.