Prerequisites (Continued)…

Before I go any further I’m having the IT guys snapshot the servers so I can roll back if things go pear-shaped. This is the second snapshot we’ve taken. As the Epicor 9 install here was at 9.05.700c and part of the path to E10 is the need to first be on 9.05.702a we took a pre-patch copy of the servers, not just to make sure we can roll back if we make a mistake but also to allow us to roll back to test the upgrade process again when we’ve been through everything we need do to get it to 10. Getting to 702 was pretty straight-forward, anyone who’s done a patch install will do this with their eyes closed. Spread over 2 1/2 days it took a total of 8 hours to download the update, install it, run the necessary conversion programs, and refresh the training database. Why spread out? Unfortunately we still have ongoing developments to do in the E9 system that’s Live at the moment so wait periods during the patch/upgrade is development time. I would have liked to have the luxury of a code freeze but it’s not practical here so we’ll redevelop the additional E9 pieces that we complete when E10 is ready for testing by the business.

Anyway, carrying on with the prerequisites I’ve checked that the Full-Text Search feature is installed on the SQL Server instance. In SQL Server Management Studio I entered the following:

SELECT

FULLTESTSERVICEPROPERTY(‘IsFulltextInstalled’)

IF (1 =

FULLTESTSERVICEPROPERTY(‘IsFullTestInstalled’)) print ‘Installed’ else print @NOT INSTALLED’

My query returned “1” so yes, its already installed. “0” would have meant it wasn’t.

We’ve never had SQL Server Reporting Services running in our Live environment but as luck would have it we had installed the components in the Development one just a couple of weeks ago. So the next step for us is to verify the settings. A quick check in the SQL Server Reporting Services Configuration Manager tells me it’s all up and running.

There seems to be a lot of housekeeping to do before we can get any closer to installing E10. I’m sure they are all necessary. I guess running through them all gives you a chance to see what condition your install was in while also giving you the peace of mind that you haven’t got problems later due to something you skipped earlier.

I cleared out all of the MIA* and *.TMP files from my Temp directory. These could have contained folders and files from a previous failed upgrade attempt and I’ve deleted them to make sure the install is clean.

Next, on to cleaning up Epicor 9. All financial groups must be posted which isn’t all that time-consuming but remember that when you go live you’ll need to make sure that there are either no groups to be posted or check with finance to make sure that posting them is acceptable. The Capture COS/WIP Activity Process should be run too. We’re not using the production modules here yet so I didn’t expect the latter to take too long to complete although it still took 1 hour 16 minutes!

My SQL collation settings are correct, SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS and the compatibility level is SQL 2008 (100) for my databases.

We aren’t using the Payroll module so while there was no real need to run the export process I did anyway and the file produced was blank.

There are a couple of financial conversions to run but as we’ve already upgraded from 9.05.700c to 9.05.702A the conversions are either not applicable or have already been run.

Seems to have gone pretty smooth so far. I’m hoping I haven’t spoken too soon though…

After backing up the database and the Epicor directories and making sure the Server Roles were configured correctly we move onto the installation of Epicor ERP 10.

The Epicor ERP 10 disks landed on my desk today and although the excitement of finally getting to the fun part of a long-awaited upgrade has me desperate to get started I wanted to take some time out and give you guys an insight into everything I do. Over the next 6 months or so I’ll periodically update this blog and detail everything: the issues and fixes, the successes and failures, the highs and lows. If you take something from this that helps you out then I’ll have done what I set out to do and that’s to pass on some of the insight gained doing this in the real world. Feel free to leave me a comment or ask questions. Enjoy….

OK, so here’s a bit of background on the company and setup I’m upgrading.

Let me start by saying that this is a genuine upgrade for a £Billion annual turnover household name. I’ve been working with them for almost 2 years on their Epicor 9 implementation and ongoing development. This is just one of many clients I’m involved with but is by far the biggest. The upgrade environment is a dedicated development environment usually reserved for patch and customisation testing and is running 9.05.700c on virtual servers. The application is installed on one Windows Server 2008 R2 machine and the database server is a similar Windows Server 2008 R2 machine with Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 and Service Connect. Capacities, processors, and RAM will bog us down in too much detail so let’s just say its powerful enough to run E9 and is a scaled down version of their actual production environment which is scheduled for go-live on Epicor ERP 10 in Q1 2015.

Just to add a bit more complexity, we’re moving away from a virtual environment and installing some serious kit to run E10 on. So not only are we upgrading the software but we also need to have it running on new hardware. Given that the kit hasn’t even been ordered yet and with the clock ticking the development environment is the logical place to start the upgrade. After all, this implementation is heavily customised with dozens of interfaces to and from Epicor 9 so I’m not expecting a smooth transition given that all of the ABL code will need to be converted to C#. Oh, and one last thing…The Development environment is Server 2008/SQL 2008 and the final physical Production environment will be Server 2012/SQL 2012. I’ll explain why during the coming weeks.

Decisions, decisions…

There is a requirement here to be able to demonstrate the increased performance of E10 compared to E9 during the preliminary upgrade. It’s our way of getting the users excited by the project and pushing to have it up and running. As this is a scaled-down version the production environment it means that we can’t just compare Production E9 to Development E10. It wouldn’t be indicative of the difference as the systems aren’t identical.

The first decision therefore is what path we take to get E10 installed. You can run E9 and E10 on the same server and with that in mind I’m hoping that we can do a new install using the same SQL instance and then copy the E9 database to the E10 version and run some conversion programs to get it to E10….it sounds logical so fingers crossed its doable.

Prerequisites…

Download the Install, Upgrade, and Supplemental Install guides from EpicWeb. I can’t stress how important this is. Before you can even stick the disks in the drive there are criteria for the OS that need to be met. Correct versions of the OS, .Net, IIS, etc. should all be installed before you go anywhere near E10. Does it matter? I don’t know how much it does but if you’ve got a good base to start on then you won’t be wondering if your install has failed because you are only running .Net 3.5 instead of 4.5. Take the maybes out of the equation, you’ll feel better for it.

I’m running .Net 3.5, IIS 7.5, Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 3.0, and have the ASP.Net module of IIS enabled so all I need to do is install .Net 4.5 from Microsoft’s website…

On to SQL, because E10 can use SSRS reports I need to make sure that an update package is installed to fix an issue with the rendering of the pdfs. KB2645648 sorts this one…

Next up? The OS. Autoupdates are switched off on my servers and they are running Server 2008 R2 without any service packs. E10 prerequisite is for at least SP1. The SP1 iso is 1.9GB. I didn’t bother downloading it, I decided that as it was getting late in the day I’d run Windows Updates manually. 96 important updates on both servers. I clicked the button and went home…