Migrations, Migrations, Migrations

For the last 12 months at least I have been industriously working on migrating Server 2008R2 systems to Server 2019. These are times that I am thankful for virtualization. It is relatively easy to spin up a new Windows Server VM, install all the needed software, and then spend the time to configure things so that everything works just right. Often times though, it’s the final configuration task that is always a challenge; mostly due to missing documentation from a vendor or software provider.

This month was no exception: we had to migrate a clients CRM systems to new servers. This was a SQL Server database, an IIS Web Application/Application Server with SQL Server Reporting Services, and an IIS Web Server/ Customer facing portal. The vendor at least provided some documentation though it was incomplete. Another application that I will need to reconfigure is an Asterisk IVR solution, so to test, I spun up a clone of the IVR Server and set it up so I could test it using softphones.

IVR Challenge

One challenge with the IVR server was some incomplete coding by the consultant who originally set this up. The IVR checks for the house number and then proceeds with its lookup from there. Well, what if there is no house number? Apparently the programmer didn’t think to check this; a query of the database would have shown him that there are indeed some properties that don’t have a house number. So I had to modify the Perl programming to account for that. Testing showed it worked, so I was happy with that and was now set up to do a cut-over migration.