CEP summary – Upgrade SCCM 2007 Secondary sites and/or DP’s to SCCM 2012 DP’s

Today it was Configuration Manager 2012 CEP time again, this time Eric Orman presented a session about the upgrade process of the Configuration Manager 2007 Secondary Sites and/or distribution points to Configuration Manager 2012 distribution points.

If you want to learn more about the migration process, please check earlier blogs:

• Automatically migrating SCCM 2007 DPs to SCCM 2012
• Movie: How to migrate SCCM 2007 to SCCM 2012?
• CEP meeting #10 summary “SCCM 2007 to SCCM 2012 Migration”

The session started with a recap of the migration feature which you can find in the blogs and video above.

Customer promise was something like 😉 :

Enable an in-place upgrade path to easily migrate to Configuration Manager 2012 Distribution Point from branch secondary sites with distribution points and remote (branch) distribution points.

Migration upgrade

• Is an orchestrated end-to-end action
• Content for migrated packages converted into Configuration Manager 2012 content library and single instance store
• Supports Branch, Server share, and standard distribution points (nice!)
• Ensure not additional site system roles exist (secondary site management point is supported)

Platform support

• Configuration Manager 2012 Distribution Points supports client OS platforms of Vista SP2+ and Windows 7+ only (no Windows XP and no workgroup systems.
• Configuration Manager 2012 Distribution Points can be x86 or x64

Readiness

• Administrator console provides status of eligibility for upgrade
• Distribution points:
  • No additional roles can be present. (PXE, SMP, etc) only distribution point role
• Secondary sites:
  • Only site server role, management point, distribution point
  • Any roles such as SMP or SUP will make the DP upgrade not eligible

Migration upgrade considerations:

Branch Distribution points:

• Only allow upgrade of supported Configuration Manager 2012 platforms (no Windows XP)
• Configuration Manager 2007 client must be removed before performing upgrade

Content:

• Configuration Manager 2007 content is preserved after upgrade
• Content conversion will copy content between drives and restart functionality allows conversion to restart where it left off in case of interrupted event.

Secondary sites:

• There is no direct upgrade path from a Configuration Manager 2007 Secondary Site to a Configuration Manager 2012 Secondary Site
• You probably do not need secondary sites in Configuration Manager
  • Distribution Points have PXE along with scheduling and throttling capabilities
  • Upward flow of network traffic is the only compelling reason to have a Secondary Site in Configuration Manager 2012.

Workflow Distribution point upgrade:

1.  Enable the migration feature
2.  Enable distribution point sharing
3.  Navigate and select a Shared Distribution Point to upgrade
4.  Complete migration job wizard
5.  The migration job will run and performs the following steps:
   1.  Configuration Manager 2012 uninstalls Configuration Manager 2007 secondary site
   2.  If uninstalled: Configuration Manager 2012 distribution point installs
   3.  Content conversion is performed
   4.  Job is completed.

Workflow Distribution point upgrade with Secondary Site in place:

1.  Enable the migration feature
2.  Enable distribution point sharing
3.  Navigate and select a Shared Distribution Point to upgrade
4.  Complete migration job wizard
5.  The migration job will run and performs the following steps:
   1.  Configuration Manager 2012 uninstalls Configuration Manager 2007 secondary site
   2.  Upgrade job pauses awaiting next data gathering job to verify of the Secondary Site uninstall is completed
   3.  If uninstalled: Configuration Manager 2012 distribution point installs
   4.  Content conversion is performed
   5.  Job is completed.

Best practices:

• Always start from “bottom up” when upgrading, this ensures no sites are accidently orphaned.
• Upgrade by remote site location
  • Perform in-place upgrade of Content Server and upgrade clients
• How to make the process faster?:
  • If you know Secondary Site uninstall is completed, you can initiate a manual data gather job in order to expedite the upgrade.
  • Clean up unneeded content upgrade of the distribution point. (this saves disk space and just simplifies everything. Do this through the manage Distribution Point Wizard in Configuration Manager 2007)

Monitoring:

• For content conversion you can monitor the distmgr.log log file
• High-level status surfaces in the Distribution Point upgrade node in the Configuration Manager console.

Additional notes:

• One upgrade migration job is performed and each subsequent job is queued. In SP1 there may be an option to run more upgrade migration jobs at the same time.
• No multi select or bulk action to create multiple DP upgrade jobs, yet….
• When upgrading distribution points you need to manually delete the Configuration Manager 2007 content.
• Package payload for the Distribution Point software is around 20-25 mb for upgrading distribution points

Start preparing now:

• Upgrade Branch Distribution Points to Windows 7
  • Use “Branch Distribution point maintenance task” to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7 without having to redistribute content
• Enable Branch Cache
• Consider virtualizing your Configuration Manager 2007 infrastructure

In my opinion the migration feature is since Beta2 even better! In Beta2 it was a prerequisite that before you were able to upgrade a Distribution Point that all other site roles were removed. In RC1 the upgrade process is able to automatically uninstall the Secondary Site before upgrading the distribution point. Nice! J

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