That is one way to do it, I suppose. Thank you for pointing that out.
Because we wanted to start completely fresh with SEP 12, replicating or DR is not really what we'd like to do.
Our current configuration is stretched. We have 3000+ clients. In anticipation of future growth, we wanted to build a completely new instance of the the manager using a MS-SQL db, on a new physical host with different drive configurations, etc.
For migration, we wanted to schedule jobs in Altiris to replace SEP 11 with SEP 12 on selected machines to allow us to gradually migrate with as little disruption to the users as possible. At the end of that process, any machines still reporting to the original server probably didn't have the Altiris dagent software for some reason and they will be migrated manually.