6. Upgrade and Migration
The Upgrade
And Migration option available in Central Administration is useful when
performing upgrades, applying patches, and migrating content in
SharePoint 2010. This functional category provides information about
Upgrading from a
lower-level SharePoint 2010 edition to a higher-level SharePoint 2010
edition (Standard Edition to Enterprise Edition)
Upgrading from a previous version of SharePoint to a newer version of SharePoint (SharePoint Server 2007 to SharePoint 2010)
Viewing the patch and service pack status of products in your SharePoint 2010
Viewing the status of your SharePoint farm databases during an upgrade
6.1. Upgrade and Patch Management
This section is used to
manage different aspects of upgrades, migrations, and deployment of
service packs and patches as they become available for SharePoint 2010.
There are six areas within this section that are used in most situations
that involve adding new editions or new versions of SharePoint.
6.1.1. Convert Farm License Type
This option is used to
upgrade from a lower-level edition of SharePoint to a higher-level
edition. For instance, if you are running SharePoint 2010 Standard
Edition and you realize your organization requires the functionality
available in the Enterprise Edition, you can access this option to enter
the Enterprise Edition product key. The product key you enter either
during the installation of SharePoint or anytime afterwards using the
Convert Farm License Type interface determines what functionality and
features are available in your SharePoint installation.
When you install
an edition of SharePoint initially, all of the software’s features and
functionality are installed, but the availability of some of the
features is determined by the product key you originally entered. After
you acquire an upgraded product key, you can enter the new product key
and additional features can be enabled.
6.1.2. Enable Enterprise Features
After you enter a new product key
for an upgrade, as described in the previous section, the Enable
Enterprise Features interface allows you to enable the additional
features and functionality available with the new product key. After you
enable the Enterprise features, all newly created sites are able to
access the Enterprise features and functionality.
6.1.3. Enable Features on Existing Sites
Even after you enter a new product key for an upgrade
edition and then enable Enterprise Edition features, you still must
enable the additional features and functionality on existing sites. The
Enable Features On Existing Sites interface allows you to activate the
new features on all existing sites in your farm.
6.1.4. Check Product and Patch Installation Status
This option allows you to
view the effective version numbers of all products installed along with
information about inconsistencies with any of the products on each
server in your farm. Use this page during the patching process to
determine if there are any servers missing a service pack or hotfix, or
to determine if there were any problems during the patching process.
For example, if you have just
added Service Pack 1 to your five SharePoint servers, and one server is
not responding correctly to Reporting Service requests, you can view
this page to determine if the troubled server has the same effective
version of SharePoint as all the other servers. If you find that it
doesn’t, you will know what needs to be applied by checking the version
to determine what it is missing. Then you can apply the missing fix to
resolve the problem.
Also on the Check Product
And Patch Installation Status page, you will notice some of the entries
are highlighted. This indicates linked text that you can click to go
directly to a relevant Knowledge Base (KB) article on the Microsoft
website that will help you resolve the problem.
6.1.5. Review Database Status
You use this option to view the
location of your databases and check the status of the databases that
are being used throughout your entire farm. All content databases,
service application databases, and even the configuration database are
listed here. This page also shows you if there are any inconsistencies
in the versions of the databases in your farm to assist in
troubleshooting problems or issues you are trying to resolve.
You can click the name of one
of your content databases to display the Manage Content Database
Settings page, which allows you to modify the availability of the
database, set the number of site collections allowed in the database,
specify a failover server option, and even delete the database from SQL
Server.
Note:
Be sure you have a
backup of the database before you delete it, in case there is
information in the database that someone needs to recover after the
database has been deleted.
6.1.6. Check Upgrade Status
You use the last option in the Upgrade
And Migration area of Central Administration after performing an
upgrade to verify the upgrade was successful or identify any errors that
occurred during the upgrade process. This option not only shows if an
upgrade fails, it also directs you to the SharePoint root directory,
%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\14\Logs,
where you can find additional information about why it failed. There are
two types of files generated in the Logs directory: an upgrade log
(.log) and an upgrade error log file (.err). The upgrade error log file
contains a consolidated version of any errors and warnings that occurred
during the upgrade.
