SQL Server 2016 is about to retire in July.
If you’re not planning to swipe the corporate credit card for ESUs… it’s migration season.
And honestly, moving your AG databases doesn’t have to be a drama-filled weekend project.
Spin up a fresh Availability Group, kick off seeding, and let SQL Server do the heavy lifting.
Then wait for the most beautiful sentence a DBA can shout to the SPOC: “Yes! Seeding is finished. We are synchronized.”
Pure poetry, relief and uptime..
So the plan is migrate a few database from the source AG (SQL Server 2016) to the destination AG (SQL Server 2025). Sources on this repo: https://github.com/ronaldgithub/sqlagmigrate/
If you have done a previous migration and you want to be 100% sure you can start with a clean sheet. Flag available is -CleanAGDestination. During the migration and you want the source database to go Offline: -TakeSourceOffline.
Then you inform the SPOC, I start now and you have some nice logging, there are no session to be killed.
Check the seeding progress..
Then ..
Monitoring can be done using Erik Darlings ( erikdarlingdata/PerformanceMonitor: Free, open-source SQL Server performance monitoring — 32 collectors, real-time alerts, graphical plan viewer, MCP server for AI analysis. Supports SQL 2016-2025, Azure SQL, AWS RDS. ) Monitoring tool.
Oh.. this can also be done in parallel.. SPOC: “Have we finished already?! How is that possible!” I would say: you’ve hired a good DBA.