How Long Approx To Upgrade 3.15 Unity to 4.04

[ischarcm]

We are going to be doing an upgrade from unity 3.15 to 4.04. We have approx 360 subscribers, approx 1000 call handlers, and a handful of auto attendants on the system. We use off box exchange 2k as the message store (will not be touching that)... Have call manager 3.3.3 in place... Approx how long should the upgrade take if all goes smoothly? Any estimations out there?

[rhindle2k2]

I would schedule 6 hours of downtime if possible. Unity generally takes a long time to upgrade especially if you are behind on Windows updates and plan on installing all the individual hotfixes that can be downloaded from CCO. I upgraded a 3.1.3 box a couple of weeks ago and it took all of 5 hours to do. Granted I wasn't trying to break any speed records or anything, but I had to upgrade the Windows service pack and all the IE/Win2k hotfixes along with SQL and the security agent and of course Unity and the latest service release for 4.04. Do yourself a favor and download all the CDs before hand. If you have the software on DVD make sure you have a DVD drive in the server. Sounds pretty basic, but I ran into this assuming the box had a DVD drive when it didn't and spent a LOT of extra time downloading CD's... stoopid me.

It has been my experience so far with several Unity upgrades to 4.0 to have a 6 hour block of time as you never know what may come up. You may also need to update the AD schema if you don't have any other 4.0 servers out there and create the new Unity accounts according to the installation guide. No matter how many times I've upgraded or installed Unity I always take the time to go through the install guide step by step and read all the release notes before installing anything new and I take my time. Something unexpected almost always comes up (at least for me) and you want to give yourself plenty of time to resolve any issues you may run into.

Just my two cents. ;)

Keith

[ischarcm]

Keith, thanks for your message. We have some help coming in that has done a couple. I do have all the DVD's.. and YES.. It wasn't until just a couple days ago that I realized the server did not have a DVD,however I do have one and was able to map a drive...and did a small test, so good there... We have planned on 8 hours downtime, so good there too... We were told to plan between 7 and 9 hours or so... that just seemed like a long time, but it came from a good experienced source and a trusted vendor of ours... We will keep fingers crossed for the best.

[rhindle2k2]

Good luck!

[slc2]

It depends on how well you keep up with all the service packs and hotfixes.

In my case, similar config but, serial integration using dialogic cards(more time) double your number of subscribers. It took me 2.5 hrs to upgrade both the bridge and unity. All the required software requisites where in place when I started the upgrade.

I tested the upgrade on our lab to make sure everything was accounted for. Suggestion, copy the DVD or CD to the local hard disk, copying the files during the install goes much faster if they are on the hard disk vs the DVD/CD.

Sabas Chois

[tonyw1538]

Be cautious about mapping a drive to a remote DVD!

I had an upgrade hang halfway through because (I was later told) I chose to launch the install utility from a UNC path (rather than a mapped drive). I had to start all over again with a DIRT restore, etc. Fortunately this was a Lab-trial run upgrade and not my production environment!

I was led to believe that I would have been successful with the remote DVD had I done a persistent drive mapping to a drive letter, but just to be safe I copied the DVD to the local hard drive as Sabas recommends.

[rhindle2k2]

I agree 100%. The upgrade that I did where I had the DVD but no DVD drive in the server I tried mapping to my laptop (the only device that had a DVD drive) and it was miserably slow and I wasn't about to try to do an entire Unity install over such an unreliable connection. I ended up downloading all the CDs from CCO. I would recommend doing that or as tonyw1538 suggested to copy the DVD to the local hd. You will only save yourself headaches by doing this ahead of time.

Keith

[hchowdh]

If you are going to be installing from a remote DVD player, CD player or from the network, make sure the Virus Scanner on that machine has also been disabled as well as the server you installing the files to.

But the best advice is to copy the files to your local hard drive and perform a DIFF between the files on the DVD to the local hard drive to ensure all the files were copied over.

[ischarcm]

thank you for all these suggestions about the mapping of DVD etc... I believe I will copy them to server as you recommend!