Moving SSIS Project from One VM on One Laptop to a New VM on Another Laptop

  • A bit of history here regarding what I'm about to ask...

    I've worked with SQL Server (mainly as a developer) since about 1999. I recently self-taught myself SSIS in 2014 to work on a side project & become familiar doing SSIS development.

    I spent about 6 months developing an extensive series of ETL packages for my client & everything's working wonderfully.

    The deal is, all of my development was done on a laptop of mine that's soon becoming my secondary laptop. The development was done within a virtual machine (using VMWare) on the soon to be secondary laptop. This laptop is old, slowing down by the minute, and working within this VM to do ongoing development on this SSIS project is slow as molasses.

    I have a new laptop that I'm slowly getting into shape as far as moving stuff off the old laptop onto the new one/etc. I've created a brand new VM (again, using VMWare Workstation) on the new laptop for ongoing work on this SSIS project, and I'm loading all of the required tools/software/etc. on that VM (Visual Studio 2013, SQL Server 2012, SSDT-BI, etc.). I'm just about to the point of being ready to move all of the SSIS project-related files from the VM on the old laptop to the newly-created VM on the new one.

    This may be a ridiculous question, but it's probably *more* ridiculous if I don't ask.

    I'm just trying to make sure that the SSIS project & associated packages still work once migrated over to the new VM on the new laptop. I'm assuming that there's really nothing else to do to insure this than installing all required software/tools (which I'm just about finished with) on the new VM on the new laptop, and then simply moving over my main folder that contains all of the SSIS project's development files & packages, and then I should be good to go?

    Again, silly question maybe, but I'm just being overly cautious that I'm not forgetting (or just simply don't know) something simple or critical since I'm not formally trained in SSIS development and basically self-taught myself all of the ins & outs of SSIS development over an intense 6-month period last year.

    Thanks for any input. Just wanting to make sure I've got all my ducks in a row for moving everything over from the old laptop VM to the new laptop VM and everything continues to work when running the SSIS packages I've worked for so many months on.

  • Only thing I can think of that would trip you up would be package encryption settings. If your logins for the VMs are local instead of windows auth, and your packages are encrypted with user key, you may lose and have to enter any saved information in the package marked "senstive" (passwords for example).

    If its the same windows auth user that should not be an issue. Other than that, any connectors that were installed on one need to be on the other.

  • I'm assuming you mean by "connectors", in my example, possibly the Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable? My SSIS packages deal exclusively with importing lots of Excel files and doing ETL on them and I had to install the Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable on my soon to be secondary laptop months ago in order for SSIS to be able to "talk" to the various Excel input files.

  • Correct.

  • I have to ask this....

    Why are you creating a brand new VM?

    Surely one of the key use cases for Virtual Machines is that you can copy the VM in its entirety on to your new laptop and carry on working with minimal fuss, adding extra memory, CPU cores and disk space as required.

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply