We’re on prem (2024.1) and I’m getting ready to start testing 2025.2. Looking for advice about the upgrade process and what you smart people think the best route is.
To get this done we’re going to need to upgrade to Windows Server 2025 from 2019. Upgrade SQL Server from 2019 to 2022, and also upgrade Epicor.
It makes me nervous to think that an in-place server upgrade, then an in-place SQL upgrade, followed by an Epicor upgrade will go smoothly in one shot in a 2-day weekend. I have a test server to test it on, but I feel like the chances of it working the exact same on our production server is slim (or is it?).
I’m thinking it would be better to stand up completely fresh application and sql servers. Do all of my testing on those, and when I’ve finalized testing simply deploy a new client to the company. This seems to be a lot safer, but also a good amount of effort.
What are your thoughts?
Am I overthinking this?
Have any of you successfully done an in-place SQL Server upgrade? Have you run into any errors or problems doing it?
I’ve never done in-place upgrades for Windows or SQL. Not sure your infrastructure situation but I always deploy new VMs for Epicor and new instances of SQL. Then once we are moved over I just decommission the old.
Agreed…that’s an accident waiting to happen. Spin up new ones and park the old when done. I wasn’t even enamored with the idea of Win10/11 inplace upgrades but they ran through OK, didn’t brick a single machine.
I appreciate it. I figured that doing any in-place upgrades it was a bad accident waiting to happen, just wanted some validation. Glad I wasn’t overthinking it.
Gotta treat the production servers as largely untouchable IMO. If something goes sideways with any upgrade - Epicor, Windows, SQL, whatever - you’re at the mercy of your backups…and if there was a problem with the backups on that given day…
@chaddb - how are you handling the myriad of external systems connecting through the appservers? Other reporting tools (local or remote/web) and other web tools? I’m on prem and have thought through this a few times. Externally, it’s easy, nothing changes. But internally, things like ECM, Quickship, Service Connect, etc. all use the appserver. Are you swapping hostnames on the appservers or changing endpoints on all the apps that connect?
I’ll be wrestling with the same decision in a few months. Usually I rebuild servers to get a fresh start without all the baggage that accumulates on those machines. But this time I have everything very “clean” and am strongly considering an in-place upgrade as it saves a ton of work if things go smoothly. But OS, SQL, and Kinetic in one weekend is certainly a risk…
I’m completely on board with it, and it’s what I plan to do in the next few weeks, just wanted to know how he handled it. I was hoping to take the time to create some internal DNS aliases for the appservers but I wasn’t sure how the HTTPS certs would handle it - I’m thinking it’ll be a problem so the wildcard certs will need both names, but it’s Epicor - you never know exactly how it will react.
I keep a list of everything that needs updated. All of our custom integrations we’ve connected via Azure App Config. So we just change the endpoint for the app server there it and it’s picked up by our custom software. Things like QuickShip, ECM, etc. I just manually switch.
When I updated from Epicor 10 to 2024.1, I updated my servers to prepare for it. I spun up a new server for the app server, but did an in-place upgrade on the sql server, upgrading the server to 2024, and then sqlserver to 2024. I then uploaded my database to have it converted, and the conversion failed. Epicor said they could only convert a 2019 or earlier (I think) database, that they couldn’t convert a 2024 version. And there’s no way to downgrade the database. We tried several ways, it doesn’t work.
Epicor told me they had run into this before with someone else, and one of the techs had some scripts they had written to downgrade the database, to be able to get it into 2019, so that they could then convert it. He modified them some and sent them to me. It ended up working out, didn’t cost me that much, and the tech at Epicor was extremely helpful.
