CRM 2011 Virtualization, Replica and IDF Guide

Recently I have been working to start and activity related to virtualization of a live CRM server and then create its replica to initiate the activity of internet facing deployment. things are still out of my hand I am trying to share as much knowledge I can during the course of activities. First of all I would recommend not to change name of CRM server machine because if you change the name you have to change the SQL server instance Name use Drop Server and Add Server command I share in a pervious post. then you have to reinstall CRM server 2011 and if your machine have traces of previous version of CRM server. it just goofs up. it does not register any of the assembly that is supposed to be registered by installer. so following are some steps I have done so far and by this time I have bee able to see the interface CRM server.

1. Make a copy of production VM and start working on it for IFD deployment because that the only scenario you can reduce the down time.
2. Change Machine name because if both machine comes up live same time it will just mess up you production environment. if you have already done that mistake. delete machine account from AD and try to rejoin production machine. do make sure you have already changes the name of new machine.
3. from this point to onwards all discussion will be focused on new machine. so don’t confuse.
4. uninstall CRM server because CRM will not work its machine name has been changed.
5. check SQL server instance name if it has new name or not by using Print @@servername
6. if it not the new machine run SP_dropServer and SP_server to you SQL server instance name. it will not show up until you restart the machine.
7. once restarted go to SQL server Reporting services configuration and check it report server name and report manager names are updated if not then you have to change these name otherwise CRM installation will not proceed.
8. once report server URL is change its better to restart your machine again. once back proceed with installation.
9. install CRM server 2011 and import the organization, make sure you have install the Rollups which were actually installed previously. if not then your organization will not import.
10. since you are now going live its better to Rollup till later version which is now 8. I am planning to do that shortly.
11. however when tried to access the CRM website I realized I may have been made a biggest mistake, because I had no clue what is happening. because it was not working.
12. finally I concluded that I have to re-register all assemblies with in GAC, because each time I was getting method not found exception. which has the simplest meaning that its calling DLL/assembly is not register. I developed a simple batch to server the purpose. which is mentioned blow.

FOR %%a IN ("D:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM\CRMWeb\bin\*.dll") DO GACUTIL /i "%%a"

now I am going to install Rollups, on the same token I have created a new machine for ADFS deployment, on that machine I have configured IIS and installed SQL Server 2008 R2. I will try to keep updated everyone.