Planning for SharePoint 2010 - Upgrade Planning and Guidance OFC306 TechED NZ Session Notes

Here is a detailed outline of what I discussed and presented at my TechEd session on Wednesday 16th September in Auckland – New Zealand titled Planning for SharePoint 2010 - Upgrade Planning and Guidance OFC306. Thanks to all of you who came along to the session. This is a first in a series of posts and White Papers that I will publish as part of an ongoing series on planning to upgrade to SharePoint Server 2010. Needless to say that I will only cover planning aspects and will NOT be talking about any new features or functionality of SharePoint 2010. Please visit the SharePoint team blog for details of SharePoint 2010.

This has been common knowledge for a while and the SharePoint product team announced that SharePoint 2010 will only be available in x64 (64bit) versions. Therefore the first step is to plan to move, migrate or upgrade your SharePoint infrastructure to 64bit.

For complete system requirements visit : http://tinyurl.com/SP2010SysReqs

In my session and in the series of posts these are the scenarios that I wanted to showcase.

One of the first steps that you need to do in ensuring the success of your deployment is to conduct a current system audit and put in place a test environment to test your approach. In any scenario you will need to have a separate environment to be able to test and debug any issues. You can use your existing SharePoint DEV and STG servers or you could use a separate virtualised environment. Considerations that you will need to make when planning is the amount of disk space you will need for backing up and restoring SQL databases.

*Note: Even building your pre test/pre upgrade deployment will be a good test to ensure that you can replicate your server farm.

Conducting a SharePoint audit should be carried out periodically as part of your administrative regime in your deployment regardless. If you are managing a medium to large SharePoint farm servicing a large number of applications and site collections then this should be a regular*** audit and document*** process. There are quite a few tools that you can use to conduct an audit of your existing SharePoint platform. The most common tools that you can use today are as follows.

What option or tool you chose is up to you. You should document the following once you have done your audit.

](https://www.chandima.net/Blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/225/EnumContentDBS_2_64256035.png)

](https://www.chandima.net/Blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/225/OutPut_2_64256035.png)

The above screenshots show using STSADM to identify content databases associated with a web application. You can also output these as text or xml files to be included as part of a report. For a complete list of available commands in STSADM type “stsadm –help” or for a particular command “stsadm –help commandname”.

After you have done your audit you should be able to now plan out what your strategy is. You may find your self in the following scenarios with regards to your current status of your server farm.

Move - Use the procedures for moving a farm or components when you are changing to different hardware (large disks, more processors) Migrate – From 32bit to 64bit (or Content from a source farm to a destination farm) Upgrade – Apply new updates and or Service Packs to SharePoint Server 2007 or upgrade to vNext (SP2010)

In my session I introduced the tiered phased approach. This approach is outlined so that you can plan and move your existing 32bit SharePoint 2007 farm to a 64bit SharePoint 2007 farm.

](https://www.chandima.net/Blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/225/image_2_64256035.png)

The idea of the tiered approach is a flexible approach which allows you to move different tiers of your farm depending on your requirements and so forth over time. In some cases you may wish to do the “big bang” approach and move all tiers of the farm in one go. This is also OK provided that you have enough servers etc ready.In my series of blog posts or white paper (If I finish it soon) will guide you through the process.

In my next post I will showcase the planning steps required for carrying out **Tier A – Phase 1 **which is to move your SQL (32bit) server to a 64bit capable SQL server and move all the associated SharePoint databases.