Sitecore upgrades The Past, The Present, The Future

Why session for upgrades? Sitecore 8.X is much better Support ends for lots of older versions Some tips and tricks for easier upgrades (and not something much more interesting)

Agenda Basic Sitecore upgrade process Upgrades in the past How I do upgrades now Upgrade speed cheats (and why not to do them) Estimating the upgrade Lessons learned The bright future

Basic overview of an upgrade Acquire the necessary packages and scripts Review the upgrade instructions from Sitecore Find all Sitecore modules used in the solution (and their upgrade instructions) Find customizations and integrations that must persist in the upgraded version Do all the steps (including configuration changes) Verify upgraded instance

My First Upgrade (lessons learned the hard way)

Read carefully the upgrade instructions Use appropriate tools for config files changes Prepare in advance the files and scripts

Upgrade process evolution Each upgrade is unique with its own problems Always spend some time checking the code, used modules, search implementation, etc. Do one "try" upgrade with latest production DBs Always define the time frames for code and content freeze

Upgrade process evolution Be careful with Analytics DB migration Backup the website root and DBs after each successful version upgrade Clear the hotfixes and support DLLs Create a plan for the upgrade

To cheat or not to cheat

Serializing/deserializing items Copy items with tools (like Razl or Unicorn) Execute the DB scripts and then move the items Use temporally “clean” instance Remove configs from solution and use only transformations

Config files in the solution Avoid adding existing config files in the solution Create a “z” folder for your transformations Use Sitecore’s “Include File Patching Facilities”

Config files in the solution

Estimates

Environments that needs to be upgraded From … to … version Used modules Search implementation

Full upgrade plan Initial Preparation and Prerequisites  Environment for the upgrade, access to client’s network (including production servers network)  Sitecore, SQL and admin credentials for all environments  Access to the source control Upgrade Sitecore Apply changes in the VS solution Deploy and test of the upgraded instance

Full upgrade plan Apply code and content freeze Acquire latest backups of the DBs Upgrade Sitecore again (and test the environment) Backup old DBs and site roots Backup and restore the upgraded DBs Install the new Sitecore instances on the servers

Full upgrade plan Deploy the solution on CMs and CDs Verify that new Sitecore instances are OK Remove content and code freeze Bring upgraded instances online

Express upgrades Promised long ago and still not released Allows you to go directly across multiple versions  From 6.6 and 7.2 directly to latest

Questions?

Thank You!