We are moving a database off of a older physical server and putting it onto a Virtual Machine (SQL 2005 to 2014 I hope). I need to copy a single database from the physical to virtual with as little downtime as possible. Originally I was just going to do a full backup and then restore on the new machine, but that will take almost an hour on this database.
My question is: If I can get the new virtual machine setup before the downtime, would it be effective to setup a database mirror from the old Physical box to the new Virtual box? Then when the downtime came I would cut the mirror (database should be in sync) and realias the server to be the same name as the old physical database server?
I have never had to use mirroring so I was not sure if this was a "Smart" way to do it. If it would work the only downtime would be the name change.
