SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Fundamentals

I attended a session on SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Fundamentals given by Sean Livingston (Program Manager, Microsoft). Sean talked about the feedback the group received an said that they implemented some things from customer feedback and internal testing.

The upgrade methods that will be supported are “in-place,” “Single-click install, (which is a SQL migration)” and database attach. You’ll need at least MOSS 2007 SP2 (or WSS v3 SP2). There’s no support for direct upgrade from SPS 2003, no side by side installation or gradual upgrades.

What if you’re still using SPS 2003? Upgrade now, or when you do upgrade to 2010 you’ll have to upgrade to 2007 first.

Tools

Upgrade preparation tools from WSS v3/MOSS 2007 SP2 include the pre-upgrade checker, stsadm –o EnumAllWebs and SPDiag version 2. For customizations, we’ll have stsadm –o ExportIPFSAdminObjects. For MOSS 2010, there’s a new SPDiag 2010 tool that is being developed. These tools will give insight into the Farm, content database and customizations.

Pre-Upgrade Checker

The pre-upgrade checker is an STSADM command option (stsadm –o preupgradecheck). Some features of Pre-Upgrade checker include reports for farm information, current or potential issues. The checker makes no changes to the environment and you don’t have to run it, but it’s definitely recommended to run it. The October Cumulative Update improves the checker.

By default it runs on the entire farm, however you can use the –localonly switch to limit it to the local server.

What does it look for? Farm Servers, databases, AAM configurations, site definitions, features, web parts, installed language packs and CAML views/content types are all reported on. It also identifies issues with data orphans, modified content databases, missing site definition or missing features.

What do you get? A report in HTML format with links to KB articles and a lot of detailed information. The report will also identify any upgrade “blocking” issues and highlight them for you.

PowerShell cmdlets

For various upgrade routines, Microsoft has supplied some neat cmdlets. The most common will be the “Upgrade-SPContentDatabase” to do a B2B (build to build) or V2V (version to version) upgrade. This command will resume upgrades but it’s NOT used when connecting database content initially.

There are several more, including Upgrade-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceAppliction and Upgrade-SPSingleSignOnDatabase for specific scenarios.

Feature Upgrades

Feature Upgrades is an optional capability that can perform B2B and/or V2V upgrades. It includes upgrade activities such as ApplyElementManifests, AddContentTypeField, and MapFile. There’s a capability to upgrade custom code as well but Sean warns that this shouldn’t be done if it’s not really necessary.

Visual Upgrade

Visual Upgrade allows you to stay on MOSS 2007 user interface or move to the new interface. MOSS 2010 ships with all the existing Master pages and CSS from MOSS 2007. The farm administrator or site collection administrator can control the upgrade. You can get a preview of the site using the Site Actions menu and checking the site settings (site title & description). The option to upgrade to the new UI will be the last field.

Some items are not MOSS 2007 UI compatible. These are My Site host, Project Web Access site collection and Report Server web parts.

Patch Management

Patch Management gets a re-haul in MOSS 2010. Administrators will gain insight via a patch management UI or by using PowerShell cmdlets. Rules can be setup to show patch status and there’s built-in backwards compatibility. Although not intended for long durations, you can defer upgrades and binaries can be patched ahead of databases.

Downtime Mitigation

In SharePoint 2010, you’ll be able to have multiple upgrade sessions and use content database attach with AAM redirection. This adds to features that were included in MOSS 2007, such as the parallel upgrade of farms and read-only databases.

Upgrade Logging

Logging has changed in SharePoint 2010. There’s now only one upgrade log per session and only logs errors. This will greatly reduce the size of log files. The upgrade log schema has been fixed as well.

For reporting, the upgrade status page has been improved and includes an upgrade status history and command line progress bar.

SSP Upgrade

SharePoint 2010 replaces the SSP concept and instead uses “service applications.” So, each SSP upgrades into the following service applications:

• Search Service application
• User Profiles Service application
• Excel Service application
• App Registry (for backwards compatibility)
• Managed Metadata Service application