Looking to upgrade NPM from 11.0.1 directly to 11.5 RC. Has anybody upgraded yet? And/or have any issues?
I just finished setting up a dev/test NPM + SAM + NCM + IPAM + UDT to test upgrading NPM from 10.x to 11.0.1 (all the other modules but SAM had upgrades to test too, testing the NCM DB consolidation, etc.. We haven't upgraded anything in 6+ months or so...) and I went ahead and upgraded SAM and NPM to their highest RC's available just to try out the new web alert manager. The NPM upgrade (just the upgrade process) from 11.0.1 to 11.5 RC "went fine/was uneventful" as in it didn't crash or have any quirks I have seen. My test install has only been running since yesterday.
Caution: I did all of this from scratch using all eval versions all on one server so there is only 1 test node I added. No other changes to the apps so the database is clean, no rules/alerts configured that did not come with the product, etc. Honestly, I would have been surprised if anything went wrong since there are no customizations....but I must test
Running on the same OS and DB version as my prodction NPM, with some archetictual changes.
- OS: Windows 2012 R2, 64x (a VM)
- Database: MSSQL 2012 (v11.0.3000.0,)
Note: The SAM 6.2.0 RC1 upgrade installer crashed once (couldn't talk to something, timeout, service stop failed, etc I didn't write down what it was), but I re ran it and it went fine.
Great, thanks! I figured there probably won't be an issue, but didn't hurt to ask first.
I had a major issue doing this and I spent the next 18 hours fixing it. 10 of that spent with Solarwinds support. It crashed in the middle of updating the schema.
Curious: Any idea or can you share some info on what caused it or what schema/table/product(SAM/IPAM, etc.) it crashed on while updating? I've always worried customizations we've done would come back to bite us someday
It was one one of my custom properties. It was a true/false custom property based on the type of Node.
Lester, did you get to the bottom of why the custom property caused so many issues?
How was this resolved?
Did SW support mentioned how this issue can be avoided?
I have many 'true/false' and 'text' custom properties and won't be a happy camper (as I'm sure you weren't) spending hours fixing this..
thanks!
I'd also like to point out that we are planning on moving the database to a new SQL server and putting Orion itself on a new server as well. Should I stay on all versions before and during the migration? (specifically NPM 11.0.1), and then after the entire migration is complete, upgrade to 11.5 RC2 if I would like? From what I'm reading it seems like it's best to do any upgrades pre or post-migration rather than upgrading on the new server first, then migrating the DB...
tsowers... I would most definitely migrate everything to new HW, make sure that all modules and components are working correctly for a couple of days/weeks, and then do the upgrade.
Technically I don't know if it matters, but personally I'd stay on 11.0.1 and do all the moving/migrating first then perform upgrades. My reasoning to do this is:
- NPM 11.5 RC is a release candidate and is relatively new, wheras 11.0.1 has been around for awhile. If you run into issues there is more of a likelihood that problems with 11.0.1 have already been seen and mitigated by the community and SolarWinds support.
- Since 11.5 RC is a release candidate, it's highly likely if you wait and do the migrations with 11.0.1 that 11.5 RC will be upgraded from "release candidate" status to just "release" status (I'm assuming this is how this happens, someone please correct me if I'm wrong!) and/or a new(er) version/patch will come out (11.5.1?) that you can upgrade to. It might save you some extra upgrading steps.
tsowers
I know you are asking about 11.0.1, and we had upgraded from 11.0, but I figured I would just link to some of the problems I ran into with our upgrade. We ended up having to roll back to 11.0, as things just started to slow down and stop working little by little. Eventually, after 2 or 3 support calls, over 3 days, I could not risk having the system fail and miss some critical alerts or data, so I rolled back.
A few findings, after NPM 11.5 RC Upgrade...
-Will
We went from 11.0.1 to 11.5 RC2. Just some information:
NPM, NCM, NTA, SAM, IPAM, and UDT on one application server
1 SQL server
No additional pollers or web servers. We have about 500 nodes, and several thousand SAM components. We only have about 10 alerts active, and most of them are based off of custom node properties.
I did the upgrade, and the upgrade process worked fine. I also upgraded SAM to 6.2 RC as well, as that was required for the SAM alerts to get imported. I know some people have had issues with the WPM alerts, but we don't have that module.
I did have a few issues after the upgrade, and most of them are in this post on Thwack: NPM 11.5 RC - 2 issues
They did fix my logo issue (support did it via the database), and I had to recreate some of my custom charts that had the UniqueName attribute. I did have my volume alerts change the way they show free space, putting the entire number as bytes. I found a post on Thwack that mentioned using it like this in the email alert: ${SQL:Select Round((${VolumeSpaceAvailable}/1073741824),3)} (I used to have simply ${VolumeSpaceAvailable})
Not sure this helps, but for the most part, I am happy with how it went. We did our upgrade about a week ago.
make sure that you enable or set the compatibility level of your current database at least to 100.
to check your compatibility run this on your database on MS SQL management studio:
USE name of the database;
GO
SELECT compatibility_level
FROM sys.databases WHERE name = 'name of your database';
Then if the result is below 100 run this query to change it:
ALTER DATABASE NetPerfMon
SET COMPATIBILITY_LEVEL = 100
- just back up your database before changing this (given the result is below 100).
