We will stand up an exact duplicate of our Production MOSS farm. The objective is to have two identical farms running simultaneously while we remove some customizations we no longer need, but we don’t want to do this directly in our production environment. Obviously, the new farm can’t have the same URL as the original farm.
When we’re done we will refresh the content in the new farm and then it will become Production, but first we need to have users reach the web applications in the new farm seamlessly.
How can we change the URL (host headers) for all the web applications in the new farm to the old farm’s URLs? (for example: if the old farm web app was http://production and the corresponding web app in new farm is http://production-temp by the end of the Maintenance, and after taking the old farm offline, http://production-temp web app in the new farm will have to be renamed to http://production )
The requirements are to keep minimal down time as possible and not extending the web applications, we have extended some web applications to enable FBA and we don’t want to add more SP Administration overhead.
Is it possible to just modify the IIS host headers , update the existing AAMs accordingly and adjust the DNS entries? If so, would this procedure automatically update every SharePoint web app links?
Environment:
2 Web Front End Servers (NLB)
1 Application server (CA, search, indexing)
1 SQL 2008 server (clustered)