Migrating JIRA from an old server to a new server

[Bharat Pant]

Hi there,

Good day, I have a doubt regarding Migrating JIRA which is already running in an old server, to a new server which is just for the underlying OS version upgrade. 

We are migrating our JIRA application which was earlier installed on a server having WINDOWS 2008 server edition installed and now we are migrating to WINDOWS 2012 server edition.

I installed JIRA in the new machine but when I am trying to configure JIRA in that server and when I tried to use my previously existing database schema it was giving error as "Please provide an empty schema".

Can you please let me know the answers of couple of questions,

1. Can the current JIRA and the newly installed JIRA co-exist and be pointed to same database ?
2. If no, can we disconnect the database from current JIRA and have the newly installed JIRA to point to it?

If there is a no for both the questions, can you please let me know in this scenario what should be the most appropriate method we should go for?

Also please be informed that the number of issues in our application are ~3,00,000. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

If you are creating a new JIRA system, you need an empty database for it.

Specific questions:

1.  Under no circumstances should you point two JIRA installations at the same data set (JIRA data centre is a different case, I'm just talking about plain JIRA).  It's fine to have several JIRA datasets on one database server, but they must be totally independent of each other.
2. Yes, you can use the old database with the new installation, but I'd always recommend a copy, so you can rollback easily

Probably your best option is to get the new system up and running, with no data.  That checks that you can get it running on the target machine.  Then follow https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Migrating+JIRA+to+Another+Server for moving it to another server.