Hello Pierre,
I do agree with @SASKiwi , those are excellent guides and tools, they can give you some good information.
When you are migrating to new servers, you will need to think of several important aspects:
- It is a brand new installation, which will require an study of the design/architecture (even if it is the same) with risk mitigation, improvements & an assessment of current issues. This will lead you to work packages and a clear view of your requirements, for all your infrastructure, hardware, network, integrations, the OS and the SAS application and content.
- You will need a clear view as well of all the customizations in the OS configuration, SAS configuration, the storage configuration, firewalls, and your content as well. You might need to trace back through your Change Management system, unless you have all well documented, then there should be no issues, since M7 is similar to M8.
- SMU is a great tool, however I would not always recommend it: you will migrate a lot of things "as-is" which can initially look easy and convenient, but it will move "as-is" all the issues and garbage. When it is possible (when it is not required by one or more of your pieces of SAS Software, such as Customer Intelligence or other) I strongly suggest to do a Manual Promotion. It might seems more arduous in the beginning, but you are definitely more in control and the system will be cleaner.
All in all, if you want a complex & expensive system such as Grid to be well migrated, if you feel confident, go ahead, with good planning. If not, you might want to consider to involve the professional services of a Solutions Architect & a SAS Deployment specialist from SAS or a partner. Always consider that a good planning and set of requirements will take longer than a deployment/migration, and it is worth it. You want to minimize troubleshooting and re-deployments.
