We will stand up an exact duplicate of our Production MOSS farm. The objective is to have two identical farms running simultaneously while we remove some customizations we no longer need, but we dont want to do this directly in our production environment. Obviously, the new farm cant have the same URL as the original farm. When were done we will refresh the content in the new farm and then it will become Production, but first we need to have users reach the web applications in the new farm seamlessly. How can we change the URL (host headers) for all the web applications in the new farm to the old farms URLs? (for example: if the old farm web app was http://production and the corresponding web app in new farm is http://production-temp by the end of the Maintenance, and after taking the old farm offline, http://production-temp web app in the new farm will have to be renamed to http://production ) The requirements are to keep minimal down time as possible and not extending the web applications, we have extended some web applications to enable FBA and we dont want to add more SP Administration overhead. Is it possible to just modify the IIS host headers , update the existing AAMs accordingly and adjust the DNS entries? If so, would this procedure automatically update every SharePoint web app links? Environment: 2 Web Front End Servers (NLB) 1 Application server (CA, search, indexing) 1 SQL 2008 server (clustered)

How about this? http://technet.microsoft.com/library/cc262366(office.12).aspx Do you think it will work?

How many are the users who need to have access to the new farm. Usually have the farm ready with same url dont put the DNS entry. access the farm by changing the host header on the user machine and once everything is done. Change the ip of the Old to the new one in DNS. If the contents are not big create farms as per your suggestion remove and attached the DB from new to old. Regards, Aniket

This is a new Production environment we're talking about. 1200+ users. The idea you suggest passed my mind at some point, but I thought it would be confusing when testing and I was afraid I could accidentally deploy something or made a change into the original Production environment. Both environments will be running simultaneously at some point. Roberto.