A Parallel Approach in SharePoint 2007 to 2010 Upgrade Migration

 

By building a parallel SharePoint 2010 migration pre-production farm running side by side with SharePoint 2007 production farm, we had a very smooth SharePoint 2007 to 2010 update migration. With this approach, we could easily upgrade to SharePoint 2010 production environment or roll back to SharePoint 2007 production environment in a few minutes.

 

The basic idea of this approach is to build a SharePoint 2010 pre-production farm at url like "Intranet2010.company.com", migrate the SharePoint 2007 content database to this pre-production farm. Test it.

 

If the test passes, name the old SharePoint 2007 farm to "Intranet2007.company.com" and rename the new farm to "Intranet.company.com". If new issues are found with new farm, rename it back to Intranet2010.company.com and roll back to the old farm Intranet2007.company.com by renaming the old farm.

 

Another benefit of this approach is that the old farm will be always available as read-only SharePoint site. First users can compare and verify the content between the old site and new site. Second, admnistrator can reference the configurations of the old farm to set up the new farm.

 

The steps for the migration are

 

1. Install the new SharePoint 2010 farm.
2. Use DNS, IIS bindings, SharePoint Alertnate Access Mapping to name the new farm "Intranet2010.company.com"
3. Put the old SharePoint 2007 database to read-only
4. Backup the old SharePoint 2007 content database
5. Restore the old SharePoint 2007 content database to SharePoint 2010 farm.
6. Upgrade the old SharePoint 2007 content database using "Database Attachment" method
7. Test the upgrade at Intranet2010.company.com
8. Use DNS, IIS bindings, SharePoint Alertnate Access Mapping to rename the old SharePoint 2007 farm to "Intranet2007.company.com"
9. Use DNS, IIS bindings, SharePoint Alertnate Access Mapping to name the new farm "Intranet2010.company.com" to "Intranet.company.com"
10. Verify the old farm is accessible at Intranet2007.company.com
11. Verify the new farm is accessible at Intranet2010.company.com

 

Some lessons learned

 

1. Never install and test third party solutions (including Microsoft WSS 3.0 Application Template which has 40 solutions) in production environment.

SharePoint features and solutions are not like desktop software. A clean uninstallation of the feature from all your sub sites and site collections are almost impossible. Third party solutions are not upgraded to new SharePoint versions without delay and cost. These solution will break your new site and prevent you from upgrading.

 

2. Try to clean and uninstall as many unused or not-upgraded 3rd party features as possible.

Go to each sub site, each site collections to deactivate and uninstall the unused features first.

Retract unused solutions from your farm.

Do NOT delete the solutions from the farm but just to retract them. (in case you need to roll them back).