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Our Experience upgrading to 8.5.1 SP2

Last Thursday I was given the go-ahead to migrate and update our Orion installation to some nice new hardware we recently purchased, so I wanted to share the experience...especially since it seemed like there had been some serious upgrade problems to 8.5.x floating around. Previously, we were housing Orion and its database on 2003 Server with SQL 2000. We moved it to a much nicer box running 2003 x64 and SQL 2005 x64 enterprise. The only thing that really went "wrong" was that I forgot to renew our licenses, so I had to call in and get that done at the time that I was running the ConfigWizard...

Other than that, there were a few small issues:
-I had to re-run the config wizard once the license was entered...it errored out the first time
-For some reason, the SQL user account was created, but was not given a role...so nothing could connect to the DB until I fixed that
-The NetPerfMon service was stuck in the 'stopping' status. I had to end task on it and restart it before System Manager would open
-Some of my customizations did not work with version 8.5.1. This was due to asp.net. Fortunately, Vic (vhcato) saved me on that one. I made some changes to the LegacyProxy file, and all is great now!

Overall, the update went very well. We did notice website performance to be slow the first run of it, but as with all .net sites, once we ran through it and rebooted the server, it runs very smooth, and much faster than our old server. Also, I understand that the LegacyProxy will not be around in future builds, so either we won't be upgrading, or I guess I'll just have to learn some .net!

Here are the before and after specs:
BEFORE
Single 1.6GHz DualCore Xeon
2.0GB RAM
Server 2003 Standard
SQL Server 2000 Standard
Orion Ver.8.1.x

AFTER
2x 2.6GHz QuadCore Xeon
4.0GB RAM
Server 2003 x64 Standard R2
SQL Server 2005 x64 Enterprise (on same server until [IF] we get netflow)
Orion Ver.8.5.1 w/SP2

Thanks to SolarWinds, everyone on these forums (Vic especially) for making the upgrade go so smoothly.

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vhcato

Jake,

I'm glad it's working for ya. FYI, I read in another post that SP3 is supposed to be available sometime today, and I believe it addresses an issue with a memory leak in the custom mib poller among other things.

For those of you who have written custom resources in classic asp, v8.5.1 (and maybe 8.5, not sure) doesn't always handle these resources well. if you're passing variables via the URL to other custom asp resources, then you may need to add entries in the LegacyProxy.config file for the associated views before the variables will be recognized and handled correctly. You may also need to remove the header and footer sections from the netperfmon\View.asp file to eliminate duplicate headers and footers from the resulting pages. Ultimately, you will want to recode to use asp.net, as SW has vowed to eliminate support for classic asp altogether at some point, but this may get you by until you do. USE THIS INFO AT YOUR OWN RISK...

FormerMember

It also does not handle form data the same...which resulted in my accidental deletion of some data from some of my custom tables...so just BE CAREFUL!