Thursday, January 14, 2010

Upgrade Methods in SharePoint 2010: Part 1

Hi everyone I will explain the upgrade methods in Sharepoint 2010 in a series of two posts. In the 1st one i will tell about the two methods available to you out-of-the-box and in the second post Upgrade Methods in SharePoint 2010: Part 2 i will tell about the two Hybrid approaches that you can take

In SharePoint 2010 there are two upgrade methods available.
  • In-Place Upgrade
  • Database Attach Upgrade
Note: There is no Gradual Upgrade method available for upgrading SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010.

There is also no direct upgrade method from SPS 2003 to SharePoint 2010. So if you want to upgrade from SPS 2003 to SharePoint 2010 you will have to upgrade SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 and then from MOSS 2007 to ShaePoint 2010

Let us now have a look at both the available upgrade methods one by one

In-Place Upgrade
The InPlace upgrade is the easiest way to upgrade from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. In this approach you will install SharePoint 2010 on the same machine where MOSS 2007 was installed and the Upgrade wizzard will upgrade MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. But make sure that you have run the pre-upgrade check before starting the upgrade to check all the pre-requisites are in place and all the errors are fixed.
Here are some of the features of InPlace Upgrade:
  • Very easy.. Wizard driven process. Click …Click ..finished
  • The Previous version is overwritten
  • All the sites are unavailable during upgrade
  • Site visitors continue to use the same URLs after the upgrade
 Here are some of the advancements that Microsoft has done in the InPlace Upgrade method.
  • Restartable: In the previous versions of SharePoint this upgrade process was not restartable but in SharePoint 2010 you can restart the upgrade process
  • All Possible time-outs removed: In the previous versions if you used the Inplace upgrade a very big reason for the failure of upgrade was the time-out of one process or the other. Now all the possible time-outs have been removed to make this upgrade process more reliable
Here are the Pros/Cons of the In-Place Upgrade approach

Pros
  • Farmwide settings are preserved and upgraded.
  • Customizations are available in the environment after the upgrade
Cons
  • Servers and farms are offline while the upgrade is in progress
  • The upgrade proceeds continuously
  • After you begin an in-place upgrade, you cannot pause the upgrade or roll back to the previous version
Database Attach Upgrade
In database attach approach you install the SharePoint Server 2010 on a fresh Machine and you upgrade all the sites from your MOSS 2007 server by detaching the Content databases from MOSS Server and attaching them to the SharePoint 2010 server.
Here are some of the key features of Database Attach Upgrade method
  • SharePoint 2010 is installed on a fresh Server
  • You can upgrade the databases in any order
  • You can not upgrade any of the services or farm settings
  • You can upgrade several databases at the same time
  • Databases that can be Attached
    • Content DB
    • SSP DB
    • Project DB
  • Database that can not be attached
    • Configuration DB
    • Search DB
Pros/Cons of the Database Attach approach
Pros
  • You can upgrade multiple content databases at the same time, which results in faster upgrade times overall than an in-place upgrade
  • You can use a database attach upgrade to combine multiple farms into one farm
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 to the new farm manually. Any missing customizations may cause unintended losses of functionality or user experience issues
  • Copying databases over a network takes time and bandwidth
  • You need direct access to the database servers

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