Upgrading to SharePoint 2013Sam Hassani

• Who am I?– Sam Hassani– Principal Consultant @ BrightStarr– Microsoft Certified Master:

SharePoint– SharePoint 2013 Beta Engineer– PFE SharePoint 2013 Ignite

Instructor

– sam.hassani@brightstarr.com– @samhassa– www.samhassani.com

Agenda

• Design Goals• Upgrade Improvements• Advanced Upgrade Scenarios• Customizations and Upgrades• Planning Farm Upgrades• Troubleshooting Upgrades• Lessons Learned

Design Goals

• Safer upgrades– Removal of in-place upgrades – Adding site collection health checks– Adding evaluation sites to allow preview of what upgrade will do

• Reduced outage duration– Separating database upgrade from site collection upgrade (*saves ~2/3 upgrade

time)– Mitigate more outages with read only time providing air cover for operations

• Power to the people– Let site collection admins control their own destiny (*within farm admin controlled

limits)– Tell users what’s happening using upgrade email messages and system status bar

Site Collection Upgrades

Deferred Site Collection Upgrade• Eliminate big bang upgrades

– Upgrade database now, upgrade site collections later– Keep existing customizations, updated ones can wait

• Provide self-service site collection upgrade capability– Site collection admins can easily do the upgrade– Admins can still do upgrades or prevent users from doing them

• Upgrade-SPSite• Move forward at a manageable pace

– Initially let users stay with 2010 experience– Gradually move users over to 2013 experience

Site Collection Health Checks

• Rule based health checks to look for common known issues– Ownership can be delegated to Site Collection Administrators– Farm Admins can use Test-SPSite and Repair-SPSite

• Runs automatically before Site Collection upgrade– Prevents upgrade if blocking issues detected

• Can be run without doing upgrade

Upgrade Evaluation Site Collections

• An upgraded copy of the original site collection– More than visual upgrade

• Not intended for long term use– Read/Write– Pre-determined URLs– Expiry (farm admin controlled)

• Can be turned on/off• Maximum size can be set• Sends email notification when copy and upgrade is completed

– Requester and all site collection administrators– Email is optional if request occurs via PowerShell

SPSite“/sites/foo”

SnapshotDatabase

R/O

Cont

ent

Data

base

Cont

ent

Data

base

ConfigurationDatabase

SPSite“/sites/foo”

SPSiteCloning

CloneSPSite

“/sites/foo-eval”

EvaluationSPSite

“/sites/foo-eval”

Sites

Site Map

…

AllDocs

AllWebs

AllSites

…

AllDocs

AllWebs

AllSitesFiltered Copy Of AllSites

Filtered Copy Of AllWebs

Filtered Copy Of AllDocs

Filtered Copy Of …

//sites/foo/sites/foo-eval

Timer Job:Create Evaluation Sites

12

3

4

5 46

Site Collection Upgrade Throttling• Prevents overload from self-service site collection

upgrade• Built-in throttles work together:

– Application pool level throttle– Content Database level throttle– Content throttle

• If an upgrade is not possible due to throttling it is queued– Queued upgrades are processed by the timer service by upgrade timer job

Demo Self-Service Site Collection

Upgrades

Self-Service Site Collection Upgrades

• Site collection admin chooses when to upgrade– Self service user interface to start and review upgrade

• Health checks help ensure site is ready for upgrade– Health checks run in repair mode during version upgrade

• Farm admin chooses if upgrade is available or not– Can block or allow all or specific site collection upgrades at the following

levels:– Web application using SPWebApplication.CompatibilityRange– Site Collection using SPSite.AllowSelfServiceUpgrade

– Can set parameters on max upgrade limits and upgrade parallelism

Upgrading The Social Experience

My Site Upgrades

• Experience changes depend on My Site Host Upgrade State• My Site Host should always upgrade before Personal Sites• Only My Site Host Site collection admin can upgrade My Site

Host

Start: All existing social sites in 14 mode1. X visits My Site Host, sees 14 experience2. X visits own Personal Site, sees 14

experience3. Y visits My Site Host, sees 14 experience

Gets new 14 mode Personal Site4. My Site Host is upgraded to 15 mode by

farm admin5. X visits My Site Host, sees 15 experience

Personal Site gets queued for upgrade6. X visits own Personal Site before upgrade,

sees 14 experience7. X Personal Site upgrades through timer job8. X visits own Personal Site after upgrade,

sees 15 experience9. Y visits My Site Host, sees 15 experience

Personal Site gets queued for upgrade and later upgrades

10. Z visits My Site Host, sees 15 experienceGets new 15 mode Personal Site

11. Z visits own Personal Site, sees 15 experience

User XPersonal Site

14 Mode15 Mode

User YPersonal Site

14 Mode15 Mode

User ZPersonal Site

15 Mode

My Site Host14 Mode15 Mode

X Z

Q Q

Y

My Site Upgrades

Upgrading Service Applications

Supported Databases

• Content databases

• Search admin database• Profile database• Social database• Managed Metadata database• Subscription Settings database• PerformancePoint database• Secure Store database

– Note: Passphrase required to retain passwords in store• Business Data Connectivity Database

Service Application Upgrade1. Backup Service Application databases from source farm2. Create each service application and proxy

– If applicable, upgrade service database during service application creation– Pay special attention to differences in some services

• Most service upgrade processes are the same, some are different

3. Start service instances only after service is created with upgraded databases

Service Application Upgrade Example

$applicationPool = Get-SPServiceApplicationPool -Identity "SharePoint Service Application"

# Create Business Data Catalog service and proxy$sa = New-SPBusinessDataCatalogServiceApplication -Name "Business Data Catalog Service Application" -ApplicationPool $applicationPool -DatabaseName “BDC_Upgrade_DB"if ($sa) {

New-SPBusinessDataCatalogServiceApplicationProxy -ServiceApplication $sa -Name "Business Data Catalog Service Application Proxy" -DefaultProxyGroup

#Start Business Data Catalog serviceGet-SPServiceInstance | Where-Object {$_.TypeName -Eq "Business Data Connectivity Service"} | Start-SPServiceInstance

}

Service Application Upgrade Example 2

$applicationPool = Get-SPServiceApplicationPool -Identity "SharePoint Service Application"

# Restore Enterprise service and create proxy$searchInstance = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceInstance -local$sa = Restore-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication -Name "Search Service Application" -ApplicationPool $applicationPool -AdminSearchServiceInstance $searchInstance -DatabaseName “SearchAdmin_Upgrade_DB"if ($sa) {

New-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplicationProxy -ServiceApplication $sa -Name “Search Service Application Proxy“ -Uri $sa.Uri.AbsoluteURI

#Start Enterprise Search serviceGet-SPServiceInstance | Where-Object {$_.TypeName -Eq "Search Server Service"} | Start-SPServiceInstance

}

Upgrades In Federated Services Environments

Federated Services Compatibility Cross Versions

Customizations And Upgrade

Site Collection Modes

SP20

13 A

pp P

roce

ss S

pace

SP2013Config

Database

SP2013 ContentDatabas

e

SPSiteSPWeb

SPSiteSPWeb

WSE/14/Templates

WSE/15/Templates

/_layouts//

_layouts/15/

WSE/14/Templates/Layouts

WSE/15/Templates/Layouts

Page PageCode Code

14AssemblyRedirect

Policy

15Assembly

In-process request routing

14ModeSite Page

15ModeSite Page

Feature Fallback Behaviour

SP2010 feature replaced by SP2013

feature

Non-replaced SP2010 only feature (e.g. 3rd

party)SP2010 feature

removed in SP2013

14 Mode Features List

SP2013 feature replacing SP2010

featureNew SP2013 only

feature“Sunset” feature

Visible=false

15 Mode Features List 15 Mode Lookups

14 Mode Lookups

Unsupported In 2010 Mode• All new SP2013 specific features

– Upgrade SPSite to 15 mode first• 2010 Web Analytics

– Existing features must be removed– New web analytics features supported only in 15 mode

• 2010 Office Web Applications– Replaced with SP2013 Office Web Applications for both 14 and 15 mode– PowerPoint Broadcast sites must be removed

• No replacement available, use Lync instead

Implementing Upgrades

Build SharePoint 2013 Farm

Deploy Solutions

Copy and Restore

Databases

Create and Upgrade Service

Applications

Create Web Applications

Mount Content Databases

Validate Environment

Upgrade Site Collections

Pre-Upgrade Activities

Environment clean-up

• Gather data on existing farms (i.e. farm surveys)– Collect all settings within the farm– Get report on farm state including services, databases, and sites– Collect all customizations with installation/configuration documents

• Site Management– Delete unused or underused sites– Consider moving site collections into separate databases – 9000 ->5000 default

limit– Finish Visual Upgrades in SharePoint 2010– Removed unused templates, features and Web Parts

Environment clean-up cont’d.

• Content preparation– Delete excess columns from wide lists– Remove extraneous document versions– Check Databases for duplicate or orphaned site collections

• Migrate classic-mode web applications to claims-based authentication

Information Gathering Methods• STSADM -o PreUpgradeCheck no longer exists

– STSADM deprecated• WinDiff• STSADM –o EnumAllWebs -includefeatures -

includewebparts• Test-SPContentDatabase

– Both 2010 and SP2013 versions

Test-SPContentDatabase

• Finds issues with content databases when compared to a specific web application– Missing Customizations– Orphans

• Largely unchanged in SP2013

• New parameters:– ShowRowCounts– ShowLocation– ExtendedCheck

Demo Preparing for Upgrade

Testing Upgrade• Testing environment should be as similar as possible to

real environment• Use real data• Run multiple tests• Do not ignore errors or warnings• Test the upgraded environment, not just the upgrade

process

Upgrade Performance

Database Shape Centric• # Site Collections• # Webs• # Lists• # Document Versions• Document Versions Size• # Documents• # Links• Overall DB Size

Hardware Centric• SQL Disk I/O per second• SQL Database to disk layout• SQL Temp DB optimizations• SQL CPU & Memory• WFE CPU & Memory• Network Bandwidth & latency

Note: Each new build’s upgrade could be impacted by newly added upgrade actions or database content changes

Formulate Upgrade Plan• Determine upgrade strategy

– Upgrade preparation, testing, implementation, validation– Farm Configuration, Service Applications, Content and Customizations

• Plan business continuity– Outage length planning and mitigation methods

• Build schedule• Plan communications

Troubleshooting Upgrades

When it all goes wrong…• Upgrade Status Page in Central Administration• Upgrade Logs

– ULS Logging– Correlation Ids– Categorization of Operations

• ULS Logs• Site collection upgrade logs• Use Upgrade-SPContentDatabase to resume failed

upgrade

Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned• Ensure that the environment is fully functioning before you

begin upgrade• Cleanup and Preparation

– Cleanup soonest or pay upgrade tax repeatedly• Treat pre-production testing like production

– Use real data on real hardware, test everything for best results– Production upgrade operations is not the time to learn anything new

• Formulate and validate an Upgrade Plan– Determine approach to take

• Upgrade is a science– Test carefully, not skipping errors or warnings– Make operations procedural and repeatable

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