Hey everyone! Now that Azure's NextGen Managed Instances are generally available, we're considering transitioning our standard General Purpose Managed Instances to this new offering. I've been looking into potential downtimes since the official guidance suggests planning for this, but doesn't specify how long we should expect to be offline. I'm assuming it will involve a minor failover to the new hardware, so hopefully it's just micro downtimes. However, I'm curious if anyone has made this switch and experienced downtimes longer than 5 minutes? We're handling about 80 databases with roughly 2-3TB of data, so any insights would be super helpful!
2 Answers
From what I’ve read, there might not be significant downtime, but more of a transition phase. For an environment like yours with 80 databases totaling 2-3TB, expect that the bulk data transfer could range from several hours to a couple of days, depending on your network and disk speeds. Don't forget to plan for time needed for a pre-migration assessment, schema validation, and post-migration testing. If you opt for online migration, it might involve a cutover window lasting up to 72 hours, and you should build in some extra time for the migration process.
Great insight! Just keep in mind that having a backup and a solid plan in place is crucial when you're doing such a big migration.
I've upgraded all of our Managed Instances, and the last step was a failover which took only a couple of minutes for each. The whole process felt pretty smooth!
Thanks for sharing! Can you provide more details on how long the data transfer and seeding took for each Managed Instance, and what your overall storage capacity was for those you migrated?
This totally aligns with my experience! It’s mostly just a resize operation. They can be a bit tedious with Managed Instances, but you can predict what to expect.
Thanks for the info! I was looking into this and I figured it could take around 9-15 hours, plus a potential 10min downtime at the end, since some databases might take a little longer to come online after seeding. I definitely want to give this a shot, potentially starting on a Friday evening, and will let everyone know how it goes!