NPM 12.2 Upgrade Experience Feedback?

What the Version now ?

Everything went extremely smooth for me. I upgraded NPM, SAM, NCM, UDT, IPAM, and VIM. Much faster upgrade than normal and didn't run into any issues.

We built out a new server to finally get off of 2008.   I was rather dreading this migration and update but it could not have been smoother.   I scheduled a 6 hour downtime window and we were back up and running in just over two ( and of course half of that time was waiting for the Website Optimization to complete )    We migrated/updated  NPM, NCM, IPAM, SAM, WPM and NTA.   No issues.

Interesting.  I'm a version back--NPM 12.0.1.  The PUA says it can't handle the upgrade to 12.2.  Some internal SW folks told me in a Thwack meeting today that I had to download another set of app installers to get the job done.  Then Support told me to just use the PUA to get to 12.1, then use the NEW PUA to go to 12.2.

Sadly I'm dealing with Server 2008 issues, so until I get the new VM licensing for 2012 resolved, I'm on hold for 12.2.

Yes, built out a new server and brought it up using the name/ip of our older server.   Installed software and updated all in one step using our old DB.   As worried as I was about this one it turned out to be the smoothest SW upgrade I have ever done.
Roughly followed this upgrade doc

I brought a server on NPM 12.0.1, SAM 6.3.0, NCM 7.5.1, UDT 3.2.4, and SRM 6.3.0 directly to the current releases with the new installer without any issues.  There is no need to take an interim step of going to 12.1.  One word of warning, the installer will check for incompatibilities with existing modules and will refuse to proceed if any are found.  In this case, the client had installed a version of the Patch Manager Orion module that was not compatible with their other existing modules and the new installer wouldn't proceed with it installed.  Once the PM module was uninstalled, the upgrade went through without issue.

That's very encouraging, blsanner 

My Product Upgrade Advisor says it doesn't handle NPM 12.2-only 12.1.  I think this might have been why it was suggested I upgrade from 12.01. to 12.1--that perhaps the PUA could handle going from 12.1 to 12.2, but not from 12.0.1 to 12.2.

Was this new installer something you had to download separately?

No, if you look at the downloads for NPM 12.2, it's an all in one installer.  They have both an online one, which is real small (~11 MB), and an offline one which is over 2 GB.  This installer will install/upgrade all Orion modules at once, which means only one run through of the Configuration Wizard.  I looked at the extracted installers while it was running and it included the last 2 - 3 versions of each module, apparently in case an interim upgrade was needed.  Note that was for the offline installer which is what I had to use because the client's servers didn't have Internet access.  The online installer will download whatever installers it needs.

That's exactly what I was waiting for in NPM 12.2.  I participated in a UX session about this before 12.2 was released, and today I was confused by the conflicting reports about how to actually upgrade.

Thank you for this reassuring news.

Upgraded from NPM 11.5.2, NTA, SAM, and SRM for that version all the way to 12.2. took a while but the Upgrade advisor helped a lot. only issue is that every time a page refreshes the stupid pencil popup screen keeps coming up. how do you stop that? this is driving me crazy and I can not figure out how to turn it off.

serena can correct me if I'm mistaken, but simply clicking 'Ok, Got it' should make this notification go away forever for your user account.

We get the same pop up over and over and over as well,  and yes we click it but it keeps coming back.

Yes clicking "ok got it" will persist the setting to not show this any more. Clicking away from the popup or anywhere not the link that confirms "ok got it" won't persist it to stay away, it will just dismiss it for this login.

rschroeder  wrote:

 

Sadly I'm dealing with Server 2008 issues, so until I get the new VM licensing for 2012 resolved, I'm on hold for 12.2.

This will put my upgrade on hold as well, except in my case I also have FoE, Pysical servers, and an unsupported database server version :-(

/RjL

Finally an all-in-one update installer!

My upgrade went relatively smooth. I had a little trouble with upgrading my additional poller because it kept timing out. The poller install package has a hard limit of 30 min to gather all the info from the main poller. I found that if you grab 'CoreInstaller.msi' and 'MIbs.msi' from C:\ProgramData\Solarwinds\Installers on the main poller and manually copy them to your additional poller you can cut a bunch of that 30 min window. Copy those files to your desktop. Then start the install on the additional poller. As soon as you start, you need to look for C:\Users\[your user]\AppData\Local\Temp\2\SWOrionSetup[datestamp]\subinstallers\CORE_2017.x\. (This directory won't be created until you start your install.) Immediately paste those files you copied over to your desktop into this directory and it'll shave off almost a gig of download (depending on the number of modules in your environment) and help keep you from timing out.

It's well worth the upgrade. I'm looking forward to future upgrades with the new all-in-one installer.

The only feedback i have is that after the upgrade a number of thresholds for ASA hardware health seemed to be messed up (using Orion defaults). to stop the alerts i had to go in there and set custom thresholds. The values it populated were correct, just the thresholds were messed up.

But im loving the new ASA insight and ACL insight it has.

As far as upgrade process i enjoyed the new installer that they have for it. No longer needing to go through the upgrade adviser was nice. was able to update 4 products (NPM 12.2, NCM 7.7, SAM 6.4 HF 1, and NTA 4.2.3) all in under an hour. And there were no issues or errors with the actual install process. Like i said the only problem that i encountered is what was described above.

Richard, would you be interested in participating in a dev assisted upgrade? I know you were in our UX session, while we were brainstorming about it, so I'm curious of your feedback with the real thing Of course after you're not on 2008

Wow! That's makes me weep a bit.

Yes, please!

I'm hoping I might be able to get our SysAdmins to prioritize providing a 2012 environment for two of my pollers the week of September 25, but I can't promise they'll do so.  Once they do, I'd love to reach out to you for assistance.

Fantastic! I'll send you an interest form to fill out in a DM, and then I'll wait for your bat signal.

Survey complete.  Now the timing's in the hands of my System Admins in charge of the 2012 VM environment.

@Serena--What's that up in the sky?

It's the BAT SIGNAL!

I'm ready to upgrade NPM, NCM, and NTA with your team's oversight.