I get a lot of people who are wishing to upgrade to BizTalk r2, from previous BizTalk versions, 2004 or 2006, and do not wish to loose their data that exists in these versions, particularly around BAM data.

Well r2 has a full upgrade setting, to upgrade your entire setup databases from 2006 to r2, it does have some issues with BAM data from time to time….  Mostly around the sql 2000 to SQL 2005 upgrade, but also in general with SQL 2005.

You can of course backup the tables that contain your bam data, and wipe your BAM databases. Perform the upgrade, redeploy your BAM profiles, and then simply restore the BAM data, from here you cubes can be re-created.

They have also asked if it is possible to upgrade just the databases to R2 and then move these to a new server they have set up. Upgrade the SQL, and do things that are generally not standard installs.

Well yes, not out of the box however. You can upgrade your server to R2, and thus your databases will get upgraded, then you can use the backup agent job, to take a backup of the databases.

Follow the DR restore procedure to move all of the databases from the old server to the new server. Keeping the name of the server the same will save you a whole bunch of steps.  Be sure to keep a copy of the SSO key, or your efforts will be lost.

If you are moving the application server s to a new server, the same method can be used. You will of course need to keep all of the application DLL’s, and re-gac them on the new server, however BizTalk will not even notice/skip a beat if you follow the DR procedure correctly, that’s is exactly what it is designed for.