EV upgrade to 11.0.1 - estimated downtime

[hockera]

Does anyone have any downtime estimates when performing the upgrade from EV 10.0.4 to EV 11.0.1?  I understand this will be site specific depending on how large the databases are, but I am just looking for some numbers from people that have already performed the upgrade.

[GertjanA]

Hello.

It depends a LOT on your databases. If you do not have maintenance on them (reindexing and all that), and have lots of items (millions) in the WatchFile tables, you can be looking at days...

A real world example:

Upgrading EV on 4 servers (1 site) with directory db of 700MB, and largest Vault Store database being close to 18 GB, the upgrade from 10.04 to 11.0.1 AND CHF1 took 3 hours. We calculated 4, but finished ahead of time due to the evdatabaseupgrader.exe. I also did some small sites (2 servers) took 2 hours. I do do several checks in between, just to be sure.

But! Do you checking before starting to upgrade. Make sure everything is backed up properly, and processed from the databases. Set the archiving tasks and provisioning in report mode, clear the site schedule, restart all services. Set backupmode on stores and indexes. Make sure your MSMQ is empty. Make sure you have enough space on SQL to perform the upgrade. Install and Run deploymentscanner ahead of the actual upgrade day. Install .Net 4.5 and the necessary features before hand. Make sure your databases and SQL are having had their recommended maintenance, and make sure you have a DBA at hand to help.

Now, before I scare you off :)

The upgrade is really simple. I assume you know:

Stop all EV-services, disable the EV Admin service.

Backup SQL databases

Install EV 11.0.1 on all EV-servers.

When done (can take a while due to registering files etc) on all 4, reboot ONLY 1 of them. When rebooted, verify services are still stopped. When so, execute the EVDatabaseUpgrader. When that completes succesfully, enable admin-service, start directory service. Verify Console opens. Do not do anything else.

Reboot the other EV-servers. Enable admin service on those, start directory service on those. When all can open console, start other services on all ev servers, verify eventlog!

When ok, either leave running for a day (just in case), or be brave (like me :) ) and enable the schedule, set tasks in normal mode, and clear backup mode.

IF you want to apply CHF1 right after that. Same procedure. I did not make a backup of the db's, as there ' should'  be a rollback possible. Follow documentation on that one. Then decide of you want all of your users to have the new search, or just a few (POC).

That's it.

GJ

[Bruce_Cranksh1]

What Gert said

SQL is always the potential bottleneck so make sure you have no SQL Index fragmentation in the tables, DBCC can give you this information,  and ensure that there as few items as possible in the Awaiting Backup and Awaiting to Index. You can see this from the VAC and Status view of possible issues 

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

My suggestion is like gertjans but just install ev on One server and do the database upgrades on that one Then if something bad goes wrong and you have to roll back, you only have to reinstall the ev binaries on one server as opposed to all of them Also run a deployment scanner sometime before you do the upgrade to make sure that you have things like the right versions of net framework, powershell, the right services enabled etc But the way that i did my last upgrades were 1. Copy the ev11 sp1 and chf1 binaries to all servers 2. creste an EVSQ directory in a location with plenty of space and excluded from AV 3. Stop and Disable all EV services on all servers 4. Upgrade the first server to ev11 sp1, reboot if necessary, the services will remain disabled 5. Update the SQL script if you have done pst migrations previously 6. Backup your EV databases (audit, directory, monitoring, vault store, vault store group etc) 7. Run evdatabaseupgrader through a command line (if you double click it, it will close the command window) -- services can remain disabled 8. Update the EVSQ location via SQL 9. Install ev11 binaries on each other server -- reboot if required 10. Install ev11 sp1 chf1 on all servers 11. Change the services on all from disabled to automatic 12. Start the Admin and directory service on server1 and wait for the event saying directory do upgrade complete 13. Then start admin, directory and storage on all servers, and await the storage upgrade complete 14. Then start shopping, task and indexing on all servers Then test. For me with about 12 servers in one of our sites it took about 2-3 hours, but there can always be small things that slow you down like someone with a SQL management studio open and a db can't go in to single user mode Or someone has event viewer open so evrt.dll is locked etc