2019.4 upgrade experience

Hello Thwacksters-

This is just me posting my upgrade experience as I go through upgrading my SolarWinds Gear from 2017.1 to the latest greatest 2019.4. I'll not be responding to any questions on here until it's through, but I'm hoping this will be informative for others that are thinking about upgrading as well.

Day 1

After speaking with support, we came up with an upgrade plan of turning down the old servers, and bringing up the new servers with only hours of downtime. No upgrade needed on the Main SQL server(we have a primary and a secondary polling engine with a separate 2017 SQL DB running on 2012 r2).

So far I have decommissioned the old polling engines which was easy. Deactivated the licenses on each poller, but I have kept the License numbers on a separate text file as suggested. Because I'm connected to the internet, my licenses showed up already as being available to install.

Now I'm trying to install the software on brand new 2019 MS servers. Welp, that has not gone so well. The firewall is on by default on these servers, and because of my companies policies, I can't turn anything off.

So at the end of Day 1, 1 ticket into support to verify this is expected. I'm a bit confused why the software is trying to install 2012 SQL server on the box, could be that I mis read the requirements of needing 2016 or better on the primary database (which I took to mean the primary DB, not the main polling engine). I have a meeting setup tomorrow with the server team, and the DB team to see if they can help with access/software. Will update as progress is made.

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chayden18

Update: Server 2019 has a known issue with the MSMQ service. The CIS control causes this and requires a GPO update for our site because of admin settings.
CIS Control 18.8.26.1 (L1) Ensure 'Untrusted Font Blocking' is set to 'Enabled: Block untrusted fonts and log events'

Rolling back the upgrade at this point because we're still stuck at installing SQL 2012 Management Objects. No definitive update as to why this happens. Found a KB, and tried the "fixes" with no luck:

Success Center

Will try again later.

chayden18

Take Two. We said to heck with using 2019 servers, and are now rolling with 2016. So far so good. Everything is installing normally. It did feel a little weird using the Main DB for NTA since we always had a dedicated server before. I'll update once I have more info....45.5% of the way done.

chayden18

So the rest of the upgrade went great! All of my data is still there (with the exception of the old Flow data due to the info being stored on the main DB instead of a standalone server. I am having some slowness on the webpage because the website optimization won't complete, but it is getting better. I did have to contact support to open a ticket to have all the licenses deactivated since it didn't take when I ran it on the old servers before we turned them down on take 2, but that only took a few hours to get resolved. The temp licenses worked fine in the mean time. All in all, once you get the right servers, this was pretty darn painless.