Upgrade Strategies for HA SQL Server Environments by Edwin Sarmiento

Session Abstract
If you have high availability and disaster recovery solutions in place for your SQL Server instances, proper planning and considerations have to be made to upgrade to SQL Server 2025. In this session, we will look at high availability options in previous versions of SQL Server, including database mirroring, failover clustering, log shipping, and replication. We will also learn how to upgrade to SQL Server 2025 with minimal downtime when SQL Server high availability and disaster recovery features are part of the existing configuration.
This session will focus on:

• The considerations for performing an in-place upgrade versus a side-by-side migration
• How to prepare for the upgrade to be successful
• How to upgrade to SQL Server 2016 with existing database mirroring, failover clustering, log shipping, and Availability Group configuration
• How to reduce your downtime and level of effort associated with upgrading SQL Server

Speaker Information
Edwin M Sarmiento is the Managing Director of 15C, a consulting and training company that specializes in designing, implementing, and supporting SQL Server infrastructures. He is a former Microsoft Data Platform MVP for 12 years and a Microsoft Certified Master from Ottawa, Canada (but he’s originally from the Philippines), specializing in high availability, disaster recovery, and system infrastructures running on the Microsoft server technology stack. His background in Unix has taken him to the world of DevOps and Docker to containerize SQL Server. He is very passionate about technology but has interests in music, professional and organizational development, leadership, and management matters when not working with databases.
Outside of work, you can find him playing jazz music on his keyboard or guitar, going on nature hikes, doing wilderness camping, running races, and training to become a pilot.