Thursday, January 14, 2010

Upgrade Methods in SharePoint 2010: Part 2

This is the continuation of my previous post  Upgrade Methods in SharePoint 2010: Part 1 In this post i am going to tell you about the 2 Hybrid Approaches that you can take for Upgrading your MOSS 2007 farm to a SharePoint 2010 farm.

Hybrid Approach 1
In this approach you can make the databases of your MOSS 2007 farm read only and then Install SharePoint 2010 ona different machine. Upgrade your MOSS 2007 farm using the Database Attach approach. (On the new SharePoint 2010 farm) and the redirect your users to the new upgraded farm. This will allow you to give read only access to the users while the farm is being upgraded so it will help you in downtime mitigation.

Here are the Pros/Cons for this approach
Pros
  • The existing farm can continue to host non-upgraded sites (in read-only mode) while you upgrade the content. As a result, there is minimal downtime for users
  • You can upgrade multiple content databases at the same time, which results in faster upgrade times overall than an in-place upgrade
  • You can upgrade hardware in addition to software
Cons
  • The server and farm settings are not upgraded. You must manually transfer settings that you want to preserve from the old farm to the new farm
  • Any customizations must also be transferred and upgraded manually
  • Copying databases over a network takes time and bandwidth
  • You need direct access to the database servers

Hybrid Approach 2
In this approach you can detach your content databases and then do an In-Place upgrade once that is done you can attach the databases using the Database Attach approach. The benefit of this approach is that you can have the speed of the DB Attach upgrade and you can also keep your farm wide settings as you are upgrading the farm by using the In-Place upgrade.

Here are th Pros/Cons of this approach

Pros
  • Farmwide settings can be preserved and upgraded
  • Customizations are available in the environment after upgrade
  • You can upgrade multiple content databases at the same time
Cons
  • Copying databases over a network takes time and bandwidth
  • You need direct access to the database servers
  • Existing hardware may need replacing
There are some more upgrade related things that i would like to mention here

If you are upgrading from WSS 3.0 to SharePoint Foundation 2010 you need to keep a few things in mind. SharePoint Foundation 2010 (used to be called Windows SharePoint Services v4) is no longer a part of Windows Server operating system, it will not use Windows Internal Database. It uses SQL Server Express. So if your WSS Internal database is more than 4GB it would pass the limitation of SQL Server Express.

Workaround: download FILESTREAM RBS Provider to put large blob objects on file system, store the rest like metadata, configuration in databases. In this way, the limitation of SQL Server Express can be bypassed. (but you should consider to move to other SQL Server editions as SQL Server Express is not the choices for scalability)

1 comment:

  1. Nice Article..............

    Regards
    Ginni
    http://sharepointissues.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete