Migration suggest needed of heavily used VirtueMart site

[ricewing]

I have a client who is currently on Joomla! 2.5. and VirtureMart 2.0.26d.  I've been trying to get him to upgrade to Joomla! 3 for quite a while. He's finally agreed that it needs to be done, however, his site is heavily used with hundreds of thousands of dollars of purchases every day. He needs to be able to maintain all of the order statuses in the upgraded/migrated version without having to take to site down for several hours or days to do the migration. He has 70 employees and $60,000 in payroll a week so his site can not be down without effecting the bottom line. I can do the upgrade on my development site but in the meantime, more orders are being placed on the live site and new users are registering. How can I reconcile the two (old version live site and the new version updated site) once we're ready to put the new site live. I'm going to need to bring over the users that have registered and their order information since the last backup. We can take the site down for a very short time in maintenance mode so we can install the new version but for the least amount of time as possible. Has anyone had to do an upgrade under these conditions, any suggestions?

Ric

[GJC Web Design]

Have done this a few times

switch off the VM2 site

clone

disable everything u can think of that isn't J or Vm, switch to Beez template

now upgrade to vm3 and J3

even if it goes horribly 99% of the time you have a usable set of tables (J3) that u can dump in a clone of your shiny new site

if all goes well around an 1-2 hours

[PRO]

http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=103041.0
it does not have to be done with akeebah , but if you look at the database tables etc.


I have done this many times on my site.
I often restructure/ improve my site

[Studio 42]

I think you should do it step by step. So you can test each time if all is working.
I personally use a staging site when i cannot stop the shop, using an exact copy of the live site, apply the updates and check what break(this is the longest part but because it's a copy you can safe work on it and do all your test).
When all is tested and working :
Backup live site, apply all your updates, do a diff of files from staging site, if this are only file changes and overwrite original files.
If you have manuallly DB changes, you need of course, do same for database.
Most time, i never stop the live shop and site or for a very quick period(some minutes).
I had never big issu doing it so, i think it's very safe,if you test all correctly in your staging site.

[Milbo]

The migrator of daycounts is perfect for it

http://extensions.virtuemart.net/import-export/virtuemart-migrator-detail

You install it on a fresh installation, then you enter the login data for the old shop (ftp, mysql) and then it ports it for you into the new installation. You can then work on it,.. and when you are ready you can update the migration with the new orders/users.

Really very handy.