Moving Insight DB

[Jed Molaver]

I'm relatively new to the Insight Mgmt Suite and while having setup a few systems (pre-7) and just recently setup SIM 4 at my previous employer, I've been tasked with moving the DB from one SQL server to a new one. Any suggestions, methods, other things I should be aware of?

The current plan is just to backup the SQL DB using the native tool, restore it onto the new box, and then change the ODBC pointer.

These forums have been a godsend in the past and any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Raymond Kim]

You should be aware that the database infrastructure between CIM 7 and HP SIM 4 is *completely* different, especially with the reporting tools.

In CIM 7, the reporting data was stored in R_ tables on the database. In SIM 4, this is no longer the case. The data comes from R_ *views* which mimic (though not exactly) the old CIM 7 infrastructure.

We've come across some idiosyncracies because of this. One of the biggest (unresolved) ones is that duplicate entries are coming up in R_Inventory (remember how they were unique in CIM 7? Not anymore!!!), because of multiple entries in the CIM_ComputerSystem table (one of the tables from which the R_Inventory view is derived) that have the same node ID (device ID) but different net names. If you look at some of the other threads, you'll see the discussion on this. We have yet to come up with a solution.

Supposedly, there's a tool that allows you to migrate data from CIM 7 to HP SIM 4, but I haven't used it, so I can't give you any feedback on it.

[Jed Molaver]

Sorry -- to clarify the DB we are moving is for CIM 7 SP2, and we are not upgrading to SIM 4, just moving the DB.

The reason for the move is to get the SQL server from a Windows 2K DL360 (no HW redundancy), onto a DL380 w/ Windows 2K3.

[Raymond Kim]

Ah, okay then. In that case, disregard my previous post.

Probably the best way would probably be to export the database and reimport it to the new server. However, I don't know how this would affect CIM (since I don't know how importing/exporting data or manipulating data would affect the CIM app -- in HP SIM, altering data could potentially break the app).

My thinking, therefore, is that the safe way to do it would be to let CIM build the database on the new server (as though you were actually installing it), then using whatever tools are supplied to export your data and import it to the new database.

Just my $0.02 . . .

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

I did a move once for CIM7, and there were some tricky settings to find, CIM7 does not only use the ODBC connection settings, it also stores the name of the server/database in the \Program Files\HP\Insight Manager 7 SP2\Config\Database.props file, so you need to change that as well as the ODBC setting.

[Jed Molaver]

Mikael thank you so much for your response -- based on my prior experiences with CIM and SIM I knew there would be some trick that I didn't know about (and was virutally undocumented).

Hopefully I'll be able to migrate the servers today or tomorrow and I'll let you know how it goes.

Thanks again everyone for your responses!