Collabshow.com

So excited to see Quest making migration possible directly from SPS 2003 to 2010.  I know Microsoft was relying on third parties for this.  Alex Kirilov and team now have a pre release Technical Preview version.  We’ve chatted about this and actually was one of the main topics of my discussions in St Petersburg.  I hope it’s everything you wanted.  Check it out!  Tested with both SharePoint 2010 Beta & RC

Key features:

• Scheduling
• Granular migration
• Granular rollback

Get more detail over on the post Challenged with SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2010 Upgrade?

 

Download link:
Migration Manager for SharePoint 2010 Tech Preview

Mini evaluation guide:
Follow this step-by-step guide to Migration Manager installation guide and test drive the technical preview
Support forum:
Migration Manager Q&A Discussion Forum

Incredible webcast.  One of my favorites from an energy level.  We had nearly 1000 register. (Still waiting for the numbers.) With nearly 400 concurrent users on for most of the webcast!

• Simplify your SharePoint 2010 Upgrade recorded archive is now available.
• Download the Practical Guidance for SharePoint 2010 Upgrade deck from SlideShare – PPTX
• Free tool for displaying storage, large files, size in versions, etc.. in a site or site collection: Storage Reports for SharePoint

Register for the next FREE webcast

• 10 Steps to Optimizing SharePoint Performance for IT Administrators on Mar 11 at 1PM Pacific.

Questions received during or after the webcast:

User Asked: If you don’t have any preupgradecheck that have a status of failed, does that mean you are good to upgrade?

Answer: Maybe.  That’s pretty good.  It does mean you should go on with your test, I wouldn’t take that as an assumption that everything will work perfect.

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Mike Asked: Can you attach a 32-bit db to SP2010?

Answer: If you backup a 32bit SQL database you can restore it to SQL 64 bit and then db attach it.  You can run a Test-SPContentdatabase against a 32bit database.

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User Asked: You mentioned remote BLOB storage. My understanding is that this still requires a third party product to leverage this functionality. Is that the case, or will SharePoint 2010 be able to natively use remote BLOB for content?

Answer: For WSS 3.0 upgrades using Windows Internal database engines for in place upgrade during upgrade it will use remote blob storage in the process of upgrading your environment to SQL express for SharePoint Foundation.  There was a demo at the SharePoint Conference by some SQL experts on using the FileStream provider with SQL 2008 for Remote Blob Storage.  I don’t recommend that.  Third party sounds a lot safer.

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Andy Asked: Any recommendations for migrating WSS v3 content db’s that are 30GB+? Is it easier to go to foundation first & then SP2010 server or going to MOSS2007 & then SP2010 server?

Answer: Current Most straight forward would be to go to MOSS 2007 then upgrade to SP2010.  I would keep an ear out for support for attaching WSS databases to SharePoint Server 2010 farms.  I do expect that should be a supported scenario, but I expect more info on that as we get closer to RTM, that would by far be the easiest and should work no problem, question is supportability.

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User Asked: you mean there is no SQL express edition for 2010?

Answer: The opposite.  Both SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server use SQL Express.

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Steve Asked: In this visual method the site is already upgraded or does it now actual upgraded till the user commits.

Answer: The binaries have been upgraded, so essentially the server has been upgraded.  The site that has not yet been visually upgraded is dependent on the old master pages and will not have the ribbon or new UI as an example until it has been visually upgraded.

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Sandar Asked: When Joel says "site" does he mean site collection or site?

Answer: In the example of… You can run preview mode on site or site collection the answer is both.  Webs can be upgraded without upgrading the entire site collection. 

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Steve Changes Question To: In this visual method the site is already upgraded or does it now actual upgraded till the user commits. So if the user is doing the actual data upgrade what happens if they hit an error?

Any errors period should be logged to the error database.  The binary upgrade will attempt to upgrade the database schema and ship with both 2007 and 2010 master pages.  After binary upgrade you have the ability to move forward as a server admin and activate new services, create new 2010 web apps, etc… the old sites don’t have to hold you back.

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Veenus Asked: what if you have a power outage during an in place upgrade? Does SP2010 provide the ability to pick up where it left off after the power is restored?

Yes, there’s a powershell script to resume upgrade for database upgrade, or you can simply rerun the upgrade and it will pick up where it left off.  It is now designed for resume.

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Phillip Asked: Will this PowerPoint be made available after the webinar?

Yep.  See the top of this post. 

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Rich Asked: We setup a Beta 2010 system, and we used STSAdm to export a site from our 2007 environment with the intent of importing it into the 2010 environment. We keep getting a failure because it says the AnalyticsLinks feature is missing and required. We can’t figure out how to install this feature in the 2010 environment. Can you give us a direction to head down?

You shouldn’t do import export.  You should use stsadm to put that site or site collection in a dedicated database and then use the test-spcontentdatabase to have it identify the file that’s missing.  You could then locate it on the farm.  You should be able to track it down… find it in the features list for the site, site collection, web app, farm, etc… assembly, GAC, etc…

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Andy Changes Question To: Any recommendations for migrating WSS v3 content db’s that are 30GB+? Is it easier to go to foundation first & then SP2010 server or going to MOSS2007 & then SP2010 server? These content db’s are going to SP2010 under a host-named site (host header) model

Answer: AHH… now host named sites have special requirements around upgrade.  Make sure you run preupgradecheck and follow the upgrade method prescribed.  Wouldn’t surprise me if the best method was WSS 3.0 to MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010 and requiring in place.

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Bill Asked: Can test-spcontentDatabase command be run from a 2010 server against a web app running on a 2007 environment?

Answer: Essentially, it’s read only against the databases so you could point at a database in another farm to say “what if.”  Would be better if it wasn’t, but other than the reads, it wouldn’t be an impact.

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Charles Changes Question To: We are just getting ready to launch our 2007 sharepoint deployment, we have very minimum customization right now. Should we go with Beat 2010 or spend the time in 2007 and then in 5 months go through the process of the upgrade to 2010?

Answer: Read the post on should we stay or should we go with SharePoint 2010.  If you can keep minimal customizations you should hold off till the RTM code from a coding perspective, but you shouldn’t wait to kick off your project.

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george Asked: Is there something we should be aware of if we upgrade to the the full version of SharePoint 2010. We are currently on WSSv3 only and will probably be upgrading to SharePoint 2010.

Answer: It’s going to be a more common question.  Either approach should be fine, but you should make sure that you test and it’s supported.  I haven’t heard the final word on that one.  I believe the most tested would be WSS v3 to WSS v4 and then install SharePoint Server 2010.

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Patrick Changes Question To: Question for Joel at the end: If I set up some content(sites/site collections) in Beta/RC SP2010 environment (knowing that these pre-release environments are not upgradeable to the full release) – is there going to be any issues with exporting that content out of Beta, and then importing into the full public licensed release of SP2010?

Answer: Build to build upgrade works just as it does with version to version with database attach.  You should be aware of the support restrictions around pre beta.  Unless you have permission you should not GO LIVE on pre release SharePoint 2010.

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Chris Asked: We’re running 32-bit in our DEV/QA environment, and 64-bit in production. Is it possible to test our upgrade in our DEV/QA environment?

You can’t even install SharePoint 2010 if it’s not on 64 bit.  There are virtual options with a 32 bit host and 64 bit guest, but these solutions are not MS solutions.  See the great debate on SharePoint 2010 virtualization.

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Brian Asked: what is the difference between B2B and V2V upgrade?

B2B: Build to build is like SharePoint 2010 RTM database being attached to SharePoint 2010 SP1 farm

V2V: Version to Version is like SharePoint 2007 SP2 database being attached to SharePoint 2010 RTM farm

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Chris Changes Question To: We’re running 32-bit in our DEV/QA environment, and 64-bit in production. Is it possible to test our upgrade in our DEV/QA environment? (can we take our dev/qa 32-bit environment, and do a dbattach on a new 64-bit server?)

Yes, backup 32bit restore 64 bit first, then you can attach the 64bit db.

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TR Asked: what if you do not have the budget in money or servers to build up a new / separate farm in 2010? what are the options? can it be built in a virtual environment, would there be any differences if you build in VM but expect to deploy in physical

Virtual deployment is very common.  Virtual to Physical conversion and visa versa itself is another common thing.  Comes down to disk IO and memory resource allocation testing.

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Franchesca Asked: At the conference there were opportunities to run through an upgrade. Is there a place that we can run these or at least a way to be able to run the different scenarios?

Yes, grab the 2007 VHD and a 2010 VHD and do the in place upgrade with the 2007 VHD, and do the database attach with the 2010 VHD.  See resources on what I’m talking about in the virtualization debate with links to the VHDs.  Essentially both would be database attach first 2007 to 2007, and 2007 to 2010.  Don’t forget the preupgrade check and the test-spcontentdatabase 

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prashanth Asked: Will there be tools for migrating search settings (scopes, crawl rules) from the old farm to new farm ?

The In place will preserve the scope and rules.  You may reconsider leveraging FAST configuration.  Many will use this as a good time to document the scopes, but to start over with the new search config.

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Kevin McDermott Asked: Any thoughts on SQL 2005 v. SQL 2008? If currently running with 2005 on the back end, when should the upgrade to 2008 occur – before or after the SP2010 upgrade?

Either doesn’t matter.  Before after or during.  I do like the idea of doing it before, so when you touch SQL 2008 you can start taking advantage of high availability planning, backup compression, transparent database encryption and so on from the start.  See my SQL 2008 enterprise better together with SharePoint 2010 for more info.

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Andy Changes Question To: Any recommendations for migrating WSS v3 content db’s that are 30GB+? Is it easier to go to foundation first & then SP2010 server or going to MOSS2007 & then SP2010 server? These content db’s are going to SP2010 under a host-named site (host header) model – db attach does not work for site collections with their own content dbs

You do need to do some testing.  I’d recommend a virtual environment so you can do rollbacks if needed.  More info on similar question above.

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@PirateEric Asked: Are there new report server web parts in 2010 that are being installed or are they being removed altogether? These are heavily used in our environment.

It’s the pages that are being changed to the new 2010 UI.  Web parts should be similar.

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Chris Asked: Since you like the DB Attach metthod more, would you run a SharePoint SQL server in a virtual environment?

Answer: It doesn’t mean I’d run SQL in a virtual environment.  I think that depends on the amound of Disk demand.  I would prefer dedicated disks, but even then if there’s too much overhead, I’d try to keep it simple.

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Gil Asked: How has WSS change with it’s multi tenancy abilities?

Site collection groupings with multi tennant admin.  You now have more abilities to share permissions inheritance, reports, and more… It’s off by default. 

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Abhijeet rai Asked: does sharepoint 2010 provide high Availability in case of database failure also?

It’s actually SQL.  SQL Clustering, SQL logshipping, or SQL mirroring and yes with SharePoint 2010, SharePoint is mirroring aware allowing you to point to primary and secondary.

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Jason Asked: Can you explain in more detail about setting databases to read-only prior to (or during) an upgrade? If not, where can I get more info?

there’s info in the upgrade section on TechNet with the documentation around upgrade or with the new read only database option included in SharePoint 2007 SP2. 

“In a read-only farm, only content databases are read-only. All other databases, including the configuration database, Central Administration content database, and search database, are read-write.”

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Fareed Asked: When should we move over customizations from the source farm (MOSS) to the newly built SP 2010 farm?

When they are identified as dependencies in the preupgradecheck report.

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Mike Asked: No details anywhere on Fab40 for SP2010. We have most sites built upon 2 or 3 key templates. Any added steps to attach a content DB based on one of these to SP2010?

They just tweeted about it.  They are gathering requirements.  You can add the same templates to your 2010 farm which will leverage the dwps and solutions during upgrade of database attach.  In place shouldn’t be an issue either.

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Bo Asked: Which server performance indicators should I monitor during a parallel DB upgrade?

Watch your disk and memory and if your servers are separate watch the connections and network pipe

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Capers Asked: Will custom site definitions only break visual features when converted? Will conversion keep custom list settings etc?

Really is important to test.  Custom site defs essentially try to do the right thing and often need a little planning, testing and help.

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Tee Nguyen Asked: In the Hyrbrid upgrade, you mentioned exclude the root site, what happened to it?

With hybrid upgrade you’d have to be careful what is in the root when you do an in place.  I’d suggest you keep it vanilla during upgrade, then upgrade the portal through db attach.  Watch for orphans!

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Fareed Changes Question To: When should we move over cusotmizations from the source farm (MOSS) to the newly built SP 2010 farm? Are customization folders different in 2010?

The folders in 2010 are quite similar.

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Ramesh Asked: We encountered some issues becasue of Hoster header site collections restored as normal site collections , observed some wrong entries in sites and webs tables, will those be automatically fixed with database upgrade approach?

No.  You need to be careful.  The preupgradecheck should identify what upgrade types are supported.  Some may require in place upgrade.  In 2007 it was a problem to do db attach.

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Theresa Asked: What was the URL for Joel’s Blog?

http://www.SharePointjoel.com 

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Fareed Changes Question To: Any considerations in migrating sites containing InfoPath forms services?

Yes, in fact there are even powershell scripts designed for that purpose including content on technet to help you.

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Andy Changes Question To: Attached a wss v3 db to SP2010 server DOES NOT work – at least in B2 it didn’t

If it’s a host header, or if it was not on SP2 minimum it wouldn’t work.  As well you should make sure it’s supported and doesn’t have issues with preupgradecheck (including upgrade methods) and dependencies. 

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Steve Hotchkiss Asked: How about 70 GB plus content databases with several site collections. Would it be best to separate those out prior to upgrade or should the size of db not matter?

Upgrade will be faster if you can split it, but it shouldn’t be required.  Size of db simply means it will take longer.

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Sarah Satterlee Asked: We’ve got a couple of huge (250GB) wssv3 site collections. We want to break them into smaller site collections and move them into our SP2007 environment. Can we attach the DBs to SP2007 and then do the moving, or should we export sites from wssv3 and import them as site collections into SP2007? We are assuming that it would be better to have all the sites in MOSS before upgrading to 2010. Is this a correct assumption?

Import export between WSS and MOSS is quite similar.  This problem is in both with fidelity around alerts and workflows.  The good news is the workflows can be recreated in 2010 as portable workflows.  huge 250GB databases will be a struggle, but can be done.  Splitting will pay off down the road as well.

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Nick Asked: Can you suggest a strategy for troubleshooting "Missing server file or server configuration issues " from the preupradecheck report? We’ve checked the web.config for missing safe controls references both on the existing production server and the new beta server.

Best advice is to upgrade to the lastest cumulative upgrade pack.  I think I’d rerun the preupgradecheck to get more details on the missing files then try to track them down with the .log file to get the exact references and track down the app.  If you can add it back to the web.config it will save you some, or go the other direction of removing all the sites with references to reduce your dependency.

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Gerald Asked: SQL 2008 versus SQL 2008 r2 ?

See the link in my SQL 2008 R2 post.  Top 10 Features in SQL 2008 R2 from SQL 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010 better together.

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Kevin McDermott Changes Question To: Regarding Sharepoint Administrator Reports, any indication on when it will be able to see HTTPS sites? as of 3 February, that’s not available

They have taken that as a high priority DCR.  Being worked on from what I understand.  Great question.

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Angela Asked: Will it be easier to get subsites moved to be a new top level site collection in SP2010? We’re trying to clean and re-organize before the upgrade, but this has been a real pain so if it would be easier in 2010 should we not worry about it right now?

Wish I could say this is fully fixed, but sorry export is better, but still misses alerts and workflows.  (While workflows are better they need to be upgraded to the new formats to make them portable.)  There is now list export which is nice, right in the SP2010 central admin UI.  You can now get much more complicated with your repartitioning and moving things around with SP 2010 and powershell.

I’ve got an upcoming webcast on SharePoint 2010 Upgrade.  In the webcast I’ll demonstrate a test-spcontentdatabase from a SharePoint 2007 database doing a database attach and showing the 2010 upgrade UI.  We’ll drill into the various methods.  I also drill into the various methods and help provide tips and tricks and recommend methods.

Webcast: Practical Guidance for Your SharePoint 2010 Upgrade: It’s Not Just Going from Point A to Point B

Wednesday, February 17 at 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT

You’ve heard the basics, but what are the best options for upgrade? During this live webcast, Joel Oleson, Quest senior architect and SharePoint expert, will drill down into the tools, methods, and hybrid options for upgrading to SharePoint 2010. Join us for this information-packed upgrade session with tips, guidance and direction.

Register Now!

Default SharePoint configuration is not tuned for your deployment.  Did you know by simply planning for it you can easily double the performance of your deployment?   This session will focus on tips and tricks as well as best practices around optimizing your SharePoint servers. 

 
We’ll provide 10 easy steps and methods to optimize your storage, discuss compression options, and tune your worker processes. Don’t forget considering performance from client to server optimization. This presentation will include and address SharePoint 2010 Enhancements and techniques. Attendees will walk away with a step by step methodology and tools to get started today!

In this session I’ll walk through:

• Storage optimization
• Page optimization
• Webpart optimization
• List optimization
• End to end browser optimization
• Performance Tools to make your job easier
• Caching and more!

Presenter: Joel Oleson

When: Thursday, March 11, 2010 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST

Register Today!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the SQL 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010 better together story and wanted to capture some of what’s been floating around in my head.  I haven’t seen enough content and blogs on this stuff and hope that this will help spur more conversations on the topic.  Mike Watson has put out a couple of well put together posts on SQL 2008 and SharePoint 2010 in his storage considerations post and on SharePoint 2010 high availability improvements.  I also put some thoughts on why SQL 2008 for SharePoint from a while back.  With the product team’s announcement of requirements of 64 bit SQL and SQL 2005 and SQL 2008, many are asking questions.  Having spent time with SQL 2008, I do see it as a no brainer to skip 2005 or to simply go with the gold and do the right thing from the beginning.  A lot of the high availability (mirroring) and security features (transparent data encryption) are in the enterprise version, so be careful to do the right thing.  Ironically I did run into 10 Things DBAs will love about SharePoint 2010 which only enriches this story which focuses on the SQL side even more.  I have been using SQL 2008 R2 on all of my SharePoint 2010 installs.  Love the new features “Top 10 Features of SQL 2008 R2”

1. Mirroring Aware – Yeah, right in the SharePoint 2010 box you get the ability for SharePoint to understand primary and secondary content databases.  Configure it right in Central Admin. Woohoo!  Downside, SharePoint doesn’t setup the mirrored pair, and it doesn’t set this up automatically for new databases.  It requires you or your SQL buddies to setup the mirroring and then tell SharePoint about it.  Definitely a step in the right direction.  The fact that the Indexing support is redundant now makes the full story truly highly available.  That difficulty around what to do with the SSP for disasters has been cleaned up a lot making the story better for SQL and SharePoint people alike.

2. SharePoint Patching greatly increases HA for SQL – You wouldn’t think patching would have any dependencies on SQL, but the great news here is the ability to upgrade the binaries across your SharePoint Servers and not make the entire farm unavailable.  Your binaries can simply be out of sync with your databases for a limited time, essentially you can patch for security, and then update your databases during your scheduled maintenance window.  This allows you to keep your SLAs and prevent patching from causing unnecessary downtime a big win with SharePoint 2010. Mike talks about the patching in his HA for 2010 post. There was even a FULL session at SPC09 (SharePoint Conference) on patching!  Also in his post pay attention to what’s happened with the Index service due to the enhancements with the FAST search integration and architectural changes.  HUGE.

3. SQL content database structure – The structure in the content database has been redesigned.  The underlying way it stores the blobs has been enhanced.  I’m sure more info will come out, but this was a major step in the way of scale and reducing blocking.  By simply upgrading to SQL 2008 a lot of the blocking went a way due to the nature of the way SQL 2005 did it’s row locking.  64bit also helps, and since that is required we see better scalability for both numbers of databases and size.  Instead of having all the blobs in one single filestream table it is now better distributed which significantly increases the scalability of the databases as well as provides the ability to split the structure.  Don’t think this means a site collection can be split across databases.  Not yet. SharePoint Sandbox goes into more of the structural db changes.

4. SQL content database file group support – With the structural changes in the way content is stored in the database.  (That’s right your data is still in the database by default.)  You can now setup file groups on your content database in extreme cases.  The average environment won’t care, but they will still take advantage of the structural improvements.  Those in the really extremely large case, such as the more than 200-300GB you will now be able to split your content database across LUNs, or volumes to both increase performance and to simply grow the environment as it needs to.  (Still not a best practice, but with the extremely large, you’ll find TB repositories with the new scaling features.)

5. More Specialized databases – Where did all these databases come from?  Before you get upset, it’s actually a good thing, not only for Microsoft, but for you.  With the tens of new databases that we have we can now focus the write intensive databases on their own LUNs and put the read intensive databases on theirs.  Why not have Microsoft do the right thing by default?  They don’t have a clue whether your environment is a collab, social, portal, or BI solution.  You will know best if your app will focus on search, or as an application, and by having databases be specialized through the new service apps you will be able to do the right thing with the right databases.  Don’t provision what you don’t need, and allow your applications to become specialized and do the right thing from a disk perspective.  The profile database even has options for synchronization a much needed enhancement.  It isn’t managed on the SQL side, so don’t worry about that.  There are architectural decisions about where to put what service and consuming those services for some services is even possible across the WAN!  That’s pretty huge.

6. Remote blob storage enhancements – While the scenario around migrating your WIDE (Windows Internal Database Engine) to the SQL Express with 4 GB limit sounds kind of wierd and scary in SharePoint 2010, right out of the box with in place upgrade Microsoft tries to do the right thing and move your blobs into remote storage with the configuration and lists in the database and the data outside the database.  The enhancements around RBS and EBS in SharePoint 2010 still require an RBS provider.  There is support for transparent Remote blob storage.  This blog post on externalizing SharePoint content in SharePoint 2010 captures the meat of it in a recap of the SharePoint Conference session by MS people from the SQL advisory team.  It has some great detail around how it has been enhanced and some great considerations.

Enhancements in SQL 2008 R2 handles blobs way better, and enhancements in SharePoint 2010 make using remote blob storage with vendors a more manageable proposition as well.  I highly caution people against using RBS to simply save on management costs.  If you’re going to do it, do it for disk storage costs.  Why?  Because it isn’t easier to manage outside of SQL, it’s harder and more complex.  Really!  There is a free RBS filestream provider from MS, but I refer to above with use with SharePoint 2010 (Not in the box), but don’t go down that route unless you really know what you’re doing.  Again I refer to the post above.  Not many have yet gone this route without support from a vendor.  Caution.

7. Throttling – List and performance throttling reduces blocking in the database.  While these features are exposed to the SharePoint administrator… conversations around what blocking should look like and where to set the new thresholds is a good conversation to have.  The throttling on lists should definitely mean we’ve found a solution to the blocking list.  Large site deletes are another matter entirely, but on the surface, the common scenarios are now much more manageable. I’ve put together a number of blogs on the throttling.

8. External Lists – This is definitely near the top of my list.  Being able to pull in a SQL table or even exposing relational databases and put together a story of business connectivity services exposed as a SharePoint list and taking that data offline in SharePoint!  Come on this is a HUGE SQL story for usability and accessibility and extensibility.  Loved the contacts BCS demos (see more on Channel 9) I’ve seen on SQL database editing with full CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) operations in SharePoint, as well as editing them in Outlook and taking them offline in Outlook in 2010 or in SharePoint workspace.  The ability to create these external connections doesn’t take an expensive tool and can easily be created in free SharePoint designer 2010 or Visual Studio 2010.  Add on the power of SQL 2008 R2 and powerpivot and now you have the most scalable lists of any app out there with serious performance improvements.

9. Cleaner SQL Backup and Recovery Story – While the backup story of the SSP gets cleaner with having a more robust backup for SQL databases right out of the box and a less messy Index and Search backup, the configuration based backup.  You don’t need to do anything special to get config based backup.  The configuration of your services is stored in the backup.  So when you get ready to do your restore it will actually ask you.  It will ask Do you want A) same or B) new configuration during restore.  Pretty wild.  Definitely simplifies the story.  More info on the SharePoint Solutions Help blog on SharePoint 2010 Configuration Restore capability.

10.Resource Governor for SQL & SharePoint – The new schema of making databases specialized lends itself more to the idea of running resource governor to allow you to be smarter about resources.  The new logging and usage databases are good candidates.  On the SharePoint side it’s the resource governor of managing resources from a code and performance perspective which will ultimately save your front end web servers and save your backend, literally!  Refer to the throttling link above on more resource management features as well.