Anyone have any upgrade experiences for the general release?
We are looking to upgrade our entire SW suite in addition to NPM and would like to hear any feedback.
Also, is the RC code the same as the GR code?
Thanks in advance
This thread has been super helpful and given us many conversation points and feedback. However, the thread is now gotten unwieldy and hard to parse through the feedback. I'm locking this thread and for those of you who are participating in our RCs, invite you to come give additional feedback on my post Orion Platform: Preparing for the Upgrade to 2018.2 in the NPM release candidate forum. Once we are out of RC, I'll be starting a new topic thread for upgrade feedback for NPM 12.3.
Thank you and for those of you with whom I have ongoing conversations, we'll find other avenues to move forward on those topics.
All,
We have upgraded to 12.2 successfully. But, since we had an additional poller, had faced some problems on additinal poller, while upgrading from 11.5.3. Here are the Pros and Cons.
CONS:
You have to upgrade up to NPM 12.0 along with SAM to 6.3, NCM to 7.5, etc., manually download each version and upgrade.
For NTA you have to manually upgrade to 4.2.3 on NTA DB server (which is a remote to Primary poller). On primary poller you have to upgrade till 4.2.1
The catch here is, everything you have to manually download and upgrade on additional poller with the corresponding poller version.
You have to take the pain and it takes hell lot of time, if your DB is having more size. Each version, after installation, the Solarwinds Configuration Wizard would start and takes time depending on the module. For NPM, it may take 1-2 hours and for SAM 40 to 60 minutes. Because of this, we had to do in 2 phases.
Here it took 16 hours to complete up to 12.0 and other modules
PROS:
From 12.0 you can directly use 12.2 Orion (single) installer.
It really does all tests and show you what has to be done before proceeding
It shows a warning, you have to do the manual upgrade of NTA before or after on NTA server. I did before to from 4.2.1 to 4.2.3 directly on NTA DB server
IMPORTANT warning shows that you need to run the 12.2 Orion installer with local administrator user-id and not with domain admin id.
Pay attention to the warnings before to proceed and then it would finish installation of all the licensed modules in 30-40 minutes (depending on number of moudles you own)
Then it prompts you to download addtional poller software, and shows all the additional poller details. You have to download the Scalability Engine software for additional pollers. It would take care of downloading all packages from primary poller and install it on additional poller.
We could finish in 6 hours including manual installation of pollers for SAM & SRM and NTA.
Hope it helps.
After upgrade observations:
You won't find "Export to PDF" or "Export to Excel", instead you would find a "Print" option.
When you schedule a report to PDF or run a report, it shows light green color and blue color in the charts. But, when you export and receive the PDF, it would change the colors to Dark Blue and Green. You can test .
I will update further, with more observations.
Great feedback
I know exactly what you just went through... I've done it twice now with two different 11.5.x systems. For me getting up to 12.1 NPM and moving the SQL Server database to new VM's was a little tricky... also like you said you have to do each module independently until you get to 12.0
Even, we are planning to move DB with SSD, so that the performance would be significant. Though we are already on SQL 2012 SP1, still slowness is there on the application. The DB VM has 32GB and allocated 85%, remaining 15% being utlized by Windows. We are also planning to upgrade our VMs with high configuration.
We have observed that some slowness, after we upgraded to the latest versions. What would you suggest to increase the performance?
Hi, what Windows platform did you migrate to? Windows 2012? 2016?
Hi,
We have not migrated to any servers. We have done upgrade on existing Windows 2012 data center servers only. We have plan to upgrade the servers, not sure, which servers, but they would be new servers .
smoked_angus: I have got an update that we would migrate to 2016 (both Windows and SQL).
Please see my reply later in the thread. It might help you.
M
I'm in the process of prepping for a 2008 R2 to 2012 R2 migration of SW. Our SQL DB is already on SQL 2014/2012 R2. In order to cut down on the downtime, I was curious if I would be able to migrate the APEs to the new OS separately instead of taking everything down in one shot? My current plan of attack: unregister the license on the existing APE, shut it down, move the IP and rename the 2012 R2 server and run the APE installer, relicense and have it connect back up to the Main Poller (still on 2008 R2). I was thinking this could allow me to break up the migration into multiple days to lessen the downtime. Once I finish with the APEs, I would migrate the Main Poller last. Would that work or is it recommended that I down everything and migrate the main poller first, then migrate the APEs all in one outage window?
Yes, that's an excellent strategy. Note that you will still need to upgrade those Additional Polling Engines once you've upgraded the main Orion server, but at least the OS is taken care of. Note that if you're going to migrate, it's probably better to make the jump to Windows Server 2016 now as the end of mainstream support for Windows Server 2012 is later this year.
I have been read this thread, and done other searches, and haven't found this answer yet. Perhaps the key words of upgrade, move, NPM and 12.2 are so often being used for upgrading a server, that it obscures results of moving to a new server. We have Orion 12.1 running on WinSrv2008R2sp1, with SQL on same server. the server is not powerful enough (according to SW requirements) to upgrade to Windows 2016 and NPM 12.2 on the current hardware. So, we have purchased 2 new servers with WinSrv2016/SQL2016. Our plan is to separate the DB onto its own server, and move NPM to a new server too. I have most of my upgrade sequence mapped. We have NPM, NCM, SAM, VNQM, VIM, DPAIM, Cloud Monitoring, NetPath.
My questions are in regards to moving Orion 12.1 to the new server. What does set 8 look like? Is it like this, or am I missing something?
Remove licenses.
Take old Orion server offline.
Set the previously tested new computer to old server name and IP address.
Run script from support to change server name.
Run configuration wizard and point to database on new SQL server.
Install licenses.
Also, in step 7, can we move the DB from SQL2008 on WinSrv2008 directly to SQL2016 on WinSrv2016 prior to upgrading NPM 12.1 to 12.2?
Thanks for your input.
Question: you have VIM & DPAIM in your list of products - are these integrated with the VMAN appliance or a DPA server?
need one confirmation from ppl who have recently installed latest NPM, SAM and VMAN. In the customer portal, i am getting below option for online and offline.
But offline i dont see a comment stating 'it includes latest hotfix', so do i need to install the hotfix part separately?
And for every module i need to download separately OR doing one will allow to select all and proceed?
can anyone help in confirming?
Hi pratikmehta003,
As per my understanding and upgrade done, if you are upgrading to 12.2 via one installer, then it would take care of latest hotfixes of all the modules you have. If you have upgraded sometime back to 12.0 (when it was released), then you need to download and install the latest hotfix.
Thanks for the response. But I am actually doing a fresh install.
It does contain the hotfixes.
The offline installer contains the latest hotfixes as well.
I have upgraded 12.2 in my environment, offline also contains 3 hotfixes while upgrading the same. I felt good experience offline. I think if you will upgrade or will do fresh installation,it will take some time rather than offline.
thanks serena
Since the hotfix installer had latest date so i wanted to cross check...
Hi Serena, I do not know the answer to your question. I am not familiar with DPAIM. What should I look for?
That answers it for me! Thank you
We have had numerous challenges with the recent upgrade (full SW suite). Depending on your upgrade path, e.g. what version you are upgrading from, I would say proceed with caution. Additionally, I recommend you validate what NPM package or Hotfix you plan to install. The recent release of NPM 12.2 release date March 16, 2018 that includes Hotfix 5 you may want to reach out to Tech Support first. We specifically experienced an issue with the release, though our deployment was somewhat out of the norm.
What release version are you upgrading from?
We have had numerous hurdles and issues with our path to NPM 12.2 and modules. I strongly suggest engaging a strong help desk support person (probably numerous times and different people), and if you can, a dedicated solarwinds engineer through your Sales Engineer at solarwinds. Double and triple check everything. Solarwinds is obviously a very complex platform, and you will need to craft a strong upgrade plan. Even if you are lucky to have a lab/DEV environment, issues may not happen there may happen in your PROD platform.
My efforts involved working closely with Solarwinds Dev and SE team since we were upgrading from 11.5.3 (and associated modules) to 12.2HF5 (and associated modules). The recommendations and subsequent testing prove there is no easy path for upgrade especially if when having numerous modules. We have NPM, SAM, IPAM, NTA, VNQM, DPA, VMAN, UDT, Web ETS, SRM and NCM all of which have there own upgrade path until you reach 12.2 (Full 2.8GB Package). The fact we have more than 20 deployments of this package throughout our organization, this was a large undertaking.
My recommendation is to consider uninstalling some of the modules that are notorious for having upgrade issue e.g:
IPAM - has issues during installation specific to licensing and crashing during install between 12.01 and 12.1
DPA - due to changes in how it installs in the future as an integrated solution
VMAN - due to changes in how it installs in the future as an integrated solution
UDT - experienced numerous crashes during testing and deployment
Web ETS - Hands down causes all sorts of issues during upgrade and not a critical solution
Additionally any installation of NTA external to the primary Solarwinds server should be a consideration, timing of upgrading the FSDB server can prevent delays during the installation. I did try to upgrade direct from 12.0 to 12.2 and that did not go well either and was inconsistent during each test. So we decided to move this the transitional upgrade from 12.01 (associated modules) to 12.1 (associated modules) to the final 12.2 HF5 (all modules) then reinstall those modules that cause issues at the end.
I hope this helps, but make sure no matter what you backup databases and configurations before you proceed. One more than one occasion we were able to save our butts because we backed up the database after each upgrade stage. More than once I had to fall back to the 12.01 or 12.1 database because the install corrupted the database.
Good luck
I'd love to continue the conversation with you privately, to know more details about your deployment and how it was out of the norm. Would you mind if I sent you an email to continue the discussion?
Do you mind sharing your support case number with me privately? I'd like to see more details about what went wrong with your upgrade!
Serena,
The ticket and private conversation about that information is not appropriate this for reasons I cannot discuss, so I will have to decline your request. But I will gladly continue any questions you have on the open forum. Thx.
Of course!
First question: Why is your deployment considered out of the norm?
The upgrade itself went fine. The problem now is that my custom network atlas maps do not always load on my NOC screen.
It's completely random... sometimes it works and sometimes not. I have the same problem when trying to expand groups on my main Orion summary page as well.
themikeramsey,
What version of Orion Core do you have? Look at the bottom of your webpage and check to see if you have "Orion Platform 2017.3.5 SP5". If you do, there is a recent issue we experience with our Atlas refresh and timeout we were able to get resolved. Let me know what you find.
Yes... 2017.3.5 SP5
Mike and thwacksters,
I had the same issue and after many weeks working with support and Devs they finally got a work around look below. DISCLAIMER (I don't know if they have a KB and I do not warrant or assume any risk as this is not an official release or my own, but only that it seemed to work for me. I do not take responsibility for any issues that may arise as I cannot predict issues. As always make sure you back up your database and make sure you make snapshots or create backup copies of any original files you modify before you modify them.) If you have any issues solar winds has a crack squad of engineers, devs, and support staff.
1. Backup the file below and save it outside the default directory 2. Edit the file (open in Notepad) (YOUR INSTALL DIRECTORY):\Program Files (x86)\SolarWinds\Orion\Information Service\3.0\Schemas\SettingsSchema.xml 3. Insert the highlighted line: <allow operations="r" /> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <schema xmlns="http://schemas.solarwinds.com/2008/12/InformationServiceSchema"> <informationModel> <entity name="Orion.Setting" base="System.Entity" federate="true"> <accessControl><allow operations="r" /> <allow operations="ru" right="admin" /> </accessControl> 4. Save the file. The change will be picked up immediately, no services restarts are necessary.
After this maps work as expect. Please reply on this forum if it works for you as that mayh prompt a faster KB release. The devs did mention the map issue should be fixed in the next release however you never know if it really is that same issue so this should work till an official release documents that fix in the release notes.
Regards,
Thanks for sharing that Adam. I wish more people would share the workarounds here.
That did it... thanks!
Your welcome I have also posted it in this article I was trying to track before I got the workaround. Mark as helpful or as a correct answer if you agree. I hope that will hint others to see the work around
NPM is not showing any MAP ( Error: An unexpected error occurred.)
